I have a confession to make.
I haven’t written anything in over a year.
I realize the irony of writing in a blog to say I haven’t written but this post is more for me than to anyone else. Call it an exercise in therapy.
I do write blogs. I have this one charting the day to day life as a married and now pregnant woman. I also have a semi-popular gaming blog with over a hundred readers that I write on a fairly regular basis.
But I haven’t sat down and written anything creative, anything non-blog in over a year.
Why?
I could list a host of excuses as to why not and that’s all they’d be – excuses. The simple fact of the matter is, I’m scared to write anything.
Before you roll your eyes and go “pfft” here’s some back story.
I’ve wanted to write since I was about twelve years old. The first story I ever wrote was in a 3-subject spiral notebook and it was a sequel to Newsies, which was my favorite movie at the time. I even got a wild hair to write to Disney to see if I could write a series for them and received a cease and desist letter from their legal department. No big deal – I was twelve – so I continued happily writing into high school.
In high school, my teachers liked my work. I got a near perfect score on a short story writing assignment in my Literature class and continued to write stories on my own at home when I wasn’t doing homework or farm chores.
Then I get to college.
My professors didn’t really like my writing at all. See, I wrote science fiction and fantasy and that was not an acceptable genre of writing at my college. Post-modern walks down a gravel road contemplating the universe in a pea pod were way more favored. I even had a professor go as far as to say in a class that he considered science fiction and fantasy to be cop-out writing. It was the genre for people who either aren’t good writers or can’t think of anything better to do.
Of course, I could have spoken up and retorted something about Asimov or Orson Scott Card but I was a naive college student fresh from the farm and this was a serious blow to what I loved to do.
So, I did the worst thing for my writing. I switched to the post-modern walks down a gravel road contemplating the universe in a pea pod and wrote that instead. I did okay in my classes. Not stellar and, needless to say, I was unhappy. I just assumed that I would get made fun of for writing anything but post-modern nonsense so I didn’t.
My senior year, all seniors, in addition to closing out their major, were allowed to submit a proposal for an honors project. If accepted, you could work on that for some extra points and rah-rah at graduation. I submitted a proposal to write a book. Nothing spectacular but I figured nine months was long enough to write something and I was going to write something in the fantasy genre come hell or high water.
When I was turned down, I was on the phone with one of my English professors who was in charge of approving honors projects. He said to me (and I still remember it to this day it stung so bad), “I haven’t seen anything out of you to date that makes me believe you are capable of doing such a thing.”
That was it right there – the kicker. The words that would (and still do) continually haunt me anytime I think about writing.
What to do. I could tell him (mentally of course) to eff off and I can do it anyway but would I be writing for me or just to prove some old professor wrong? At what point do those words get a little quieter so I can concentrate on actually putting something on paper?
Getting pregnant has caused Stephen and I to think a lot about our future and where we want to be and what we want to be able to provide for our baby. We’ve talked about buying a house, moving to a safer part of town, Stephen’s job future, and me as a stay-at-home mother. In all of that, each of us has our own internal dialogue going on as well. Mine centers around my writing as of late.
Yes, writing and getting published and making money would be awesome. But, at this point, I think I need to just scale it back and get past the “writing” part. In order to do that, I need to get past the “You aren’t capable” part that echoes in my head all the time.
So there’s that – my confession. And I confess it in hopes that it will help me move past it if not for myself then for my family.
