Thinking about identity: "Being" a Writer

[pegkerr]

This post has several roots. First, I have been feeling definite unease over the fact that, let's be honest, I just have not been working on the ice palace book. For months. I was pecking at it, and then my computer crashed last winter, and there was Christmas, and then taxes (which are STILL not done; don't blame me, blame Rob) and the end of school and karate and oh, all sorts of things. I let one thing after another crowd into my life and squeeze out the fiction writing.

I have talked in this journal about my fear that I have no more books in me, that I will never write fiction again. I wondered, for a number of years, whether I could still consider myself to be a writer.

This came up recently because I had this exchange of comments with epicyclical. Cassie was asking whether her readers knew what they wanted to be when they grew up, so to speak. I said that I didn't know, which at age 45, I found most depressing. Cassie answered "But you are a writer -- just what everyone seems to want to be!"

And I let that comment sit for days while I thought about it. I couldn't bring myself to even reply to it, because something inside of me felt the honest thing to say was to protest, "You don't understand. I don't think I'm a writer anymore." And I didn't want to say that because a) everyone would think I was fishing for ego-boo and b) everyone would think I was crazy.

I might have just let things sit without ever answering Cassie, but then I posted the request that lurkers introduce themselves. And I got many lovely, lovely responses, but I was struck by how many said, in effect, it's so cool to read the journal of a real working writer. And once again I'm haunted by the feeling that I'm giving people a false impression.

Folks, whatever you think a working writer is, I'm worried that I ain't it. I have not made a dime selling fiction for several years now. I have not worked on the book for months. And yes, I find it difficult to admit this, because I wanted to be working on the book (but not enough to actually do the work, apparently) and I wanted to be considered "a real writer."

Or do I? And what does that mean to me?

I have thought a lot about this in the past week. And I have come to several tentative conclusions, and I realize that still I have several outstanding questions.

I realized that I was operating on the understanding that if I wasn't working on fiction, right now, continuously (and selling it), this somehow negated my past success. It "undid" my status as a writer. I had to ask myself, did this make sense? Do I cease to consider Harper Lee a writer because she wrote "just" one book (To Kill a Mockingbird), a masterpiece at that? What about Walter M. Miller, Jr., who only had A Canticle for Lebowitz published during his lifetime? Do I not consider them to be writers anymore? What is the sell-by date by which a writer's "writerlyness" expires? A year? Two years? Five years? A decade?

No, I realized. I still think of Harper Lee and Walter M. Miller, Jr. as writers, and I always will. I have had two books published. By the same reasoning, then, I have the same right to consider myself a writer, too.

But what about the fact that I'm not writing?

Well, duh, you point out. You're writing now, Peg. You write faithfully in your LiveJournal, and your words are read eagerly by more than a person or two: the lurkers who spoke up proved that.

And that's true, too. All right, so, I'm a writer. And I'm writing now, in the journal/essay format. Journaling was the first type of writing I ever did, probably, and it has been the most consistent type of writing I have done across my lifetime.

Apparently, the problem boils down to the fact that I'm not presently a writer of fiction right now.

So how do I feel about that?

Frankly, I really don't know. I am not entirely sure why I have stopped, and whether it is permanent. Is it due to depression? Is it lack of willpower? Some character flaw? Is this just the season of life that I am in, that I am a very conscientious parent in an intense period of motherhood? Sandra Day O'Connor, for heaven sakes, took five years off her career to raise her children. Why can't I do the same?

The difficult thing for me to admit is that I am not entirely sure that I want to write fiction any more. Why else am I not writing it? And yet, how hard it is to admit this, when so many perfectly nice people read my journal "to learn what it's like to be a real writer." Will you chide me for false pretenses? Will you denounce me as an imposter?

Will you demand that I give the necklace back?

To sum up: All right, I am a writer. But I am not sure whether I am a working fiction writer. I am not sure I want to be a working fiction writer anymore.

But if not . . . then what the hell is it that I want to be???

This has been a painful and scary entry to write. I have gone back and forth over whether or not I should enable comments. I want to state as clearly as I can that I am not leaving them on because I am begging for reassurances. I am 45 years old and I know that for my own mental health, I have to base my idea of myself on what I think of myself, rather than what other people think about me. But after long thought, I decided that if my intent was to speak truth in this entry, then it made sense to give people a chance to respond.

More to follow later, but I have to get the girls to bed now.

Comments

[callunav.livejournal.com]

What a fabulous entry. I'm really, really grateful to you for posting it and letting people - letting me - read it. It's not just that it resonates with experiences I've had or am having. (For five years - and those are the five years I've had anything like a career, so it's a much bigger chunk of my life than the chronology would suggest - I've been a sort-of-vaguely-therapistish person who works with really messed up kids and gets into the thick of things and deals every day with conditions that would make most people batty and /damn/ but I've taken pride in that identity, and the times I have when I wonder whether I really want to do this, and who the hell am I if I'm not The Person Who Does Those Things, I don't have another identity standing by for me to step into... yeah, there's resonance.)

(Oddly, for no reason I can explain, I'm quite able to think of myself as a writer in a minor kind of way, even though I've rarely completed and never sold anything. But that's writing as a little piece of who I am, not writing as a vocation; I do understand that it would be different.)

But no, that's not the main reason I'm really moved by the entry. And it's not about anything to do with you as a writer or anything else. Maybe I shouldn't admit this, in this company, but I haven't read The Wild Swans. I think it's cool that you wrote a book. I think any number of things that you do are cool. They're not what I really care about. They're not what I'm grateful for.

It's just that you're doing such fabulous wrestling with yourself and your conception of yourself and your conception of identity and what you want and why you want it and who you are and what you do and who you want to be and what you want to do, the pain it causes you to think some things and how you manage to make it possible for yourself to think them anyhow. For those of us who have had a taste of it, vocation matters, I think. Writer, sailor, police, priest, it doesn't matter--if you've had work to do that was at one and the same time work and identity, the idea of losing that, of accepting a role of work which is not a vocation, not an identity, is full of terror and misery. But here you are with your best-you-can-do-at-any-given-moment honesty, your courage and your self-awareness, your desire to go further and understand more--

I'm always just so grateful when people are willing to do that thinking out loud. Of all the things in the world, I think that may be one of the things I value most dearly - the chance to be present while people work out their own answers to the most important questions in the world.