So You Want To Be a Writer
Motivation, Audience, and The Writer’s Practice
I was recently asked to write a blurb for John Warner’s upcoming book The Writer’s Practice: Building Confidence in Your Nonfiction Writing, aimed at helping both new and seasoned writers hone their craft.
I was honored by John’s request, and also somewhat intrigued. I have never taught nor taken a formal course on composition, and anything I know about how to write is the result of blind intuition and several decades of reading an absolutely ridiculous amount of fiction.
I enjoyed the book quite a lot and know that many people are interested in pursuing writing careers of various sorts — so I thought I would also post a review.
Since the book itself is far from boilerplate (as you can see in my blurb below), a traditional review seemed out of place. Instead, I thought I would complete one of the writing experiences recommended in the book itself, to give you a taste of what the writing experiences are like.
The Experience
For the very first writing experience, John asks the reader to construct a brief essay explaining who they are as a writer to an imagined audience.
What have your writing experiences been like thus far — what do you write? And why do you write?
What I Write
I write constantly, in multiple formats for various audiences — academic manuscripts, grant applications, blog posts, a book for fellow college teachers looking for research-based advice on how to be a better teacher, essays for the general public, and most recently, a popular science book about social psychology and neuroscience.
Why and How Do I Write?
I write because it is in my blood.
I come from a long line of writers.
One overnight at my parents’ house, my daughter crawled into bed with me and whispered, “I just read the dream poem.”
Hazy and half still in the world of dreams myself, I pulled her small, warm body close and murmured a vague query.
“The one about the woman who caught the beautiful fish and had to let it go,” she continued, “and hoped the blood didn’t flow. By the lady with my middle name.”
She had gotten up to use the bathroom and stumbled upon one of my grandmother’s books of poetry, an ancestor whom she never met but whose name she bears.
My aunt Eliza was also a writer. She penned poems, novels, songs, operas. She told me that the characters in her stories would often take up residence in her mind, and that they were sometimes pesky — having opinions, arguments, whole lives of their own. She would at times wish to shush them.
My aunt Deirdre paints marvelous scenes and combines them with lyrical prose.
My father is a lifelong poet, crafting his stanzas carefully on yellow lined legal paper with pencil.
More of my cousins seem to write than don’t — on the complicated relations between grief and science, on adventures with lionfish, on the intersection of fashion and social justice.
When I’m working on something new, the words nibble at the edges of my consciousness while I’m running, shampooing, picking raspberries from my garden. The words press out of me. There is an insistence to them — they won’t let me rest until I get them down on paper.
I don’t feel like I have a real choice about writing or not writing.
So I write.
I write in the voice I was given.
In one my aunt Deirdre’s books of art and prose, she tells the story of a potential suitor who confronted her about her commitment to her art. She reflects that an artist does not choose their voice or their subject matter, that the commitment is the only choice.
I found great comfort in this sentiment, for I don’t love my writer’s voice and my aunt’s conviction that it was outside of my control gave me some peace.
I long to write what I most love to read — devastating works of fiction that catch your breath in your throat, that make your blood pulse in your ears. Instead my writing voice is chatty, approachable, sometimes embarrassingly earnest: a friendly, eager handshake rather than a slap in the face. No arresting storylines take over my brain, no vivid characters tussle. Instead my mind turns over and over relatable anecdotes and metaphors for complicated scientific and philosophical topics, ideas for how they all fit together.
Which isn’t what I would choose from a buffet of writing perspectives, but I do think it is why I’m a good teacher and why I enjoy a certain amount of success in popular science communication.
So I try not to let it keep me up nights that I’m not writing dark and twisty fiction, and I try to support voices that do.
I write to last.
One day while I was chopping beets for dinner, I heard my daughter giggle in delight, alone in the next room. I put down my knife, tried to wipe some of the red stain from my hands, and went to investigate. She was sitting in a rocking chair by the fire, reading Minka Ray: The Heartstone, a children’s book written by my aunt Eliza. Something in it had tickled her into laughter.
I took a smartphone snap of the moment, wanting to preserve it. A moment in which my beloved aunt, passed before my daughter could really know her, reached over the years and across the boundary of the living and the dead to make her young great-niece laugh.
Writing means etching some part of yourself down in the cultural hivemind. Of reaching out and nudging other people’s thinking, setting their thoughts spiraling in a slightly different direction for a short period of time. Of having an impact beyond your immediate social circle, and if you’re lucky, beyond your immediate generation.
So I think I also write to last beyond this present moment, in whatever small way.
Who Are You?
This is who I am as a writer.
Who are you? What have your experiences with writing been? I’d love to hear about it in the comments below — and you can hear more about this and other writing experiences in The Writer’s Practice here.
