Ink and Blood

I can’t remember why I started writing. I have a box in my closet with every journal I’ve ever had, and the earliest ones are notecard-sized, with a scribble on each page. Some are stories made of a few sentences and maybe one correctly spelled word. A more recent one is from middle school – a five-subject notebook containing my first attempt at a novel.

Skip to high school. I’m eighteen, I have too many feelings, and a strange woman — sorry, advisor — is making me choose a career. She asks me about my favorite classes, my hobbies, and what I am good at. Because I won a poetry contest, did well on all my school-related writing, and always dreamed of being a novelist, my advisor thinks her job is done.

At this time, the idea of writing just to make a little bit of money, or to have something to say when people ask you how you contribute to society, upsets me. I want to write because I love words, and because it makes me happy, and because people are interesting and I want to document them. I want to write because I have so much to say and no one to say it to. In high school I don’t write because I need a career or a major; I write because I want to, and because it feels important. But I let the woman tell me it can be my job one day, shrug, and call it an added bonus.

Then, so suddenly, I’m in college. Strange place, strange people, strange me. Who am I? Transplanted, I feel immaterial. I am like a shard removed from a stained glass window. Without the whole image, who am I? I leave every color and lead strip behind, and in this tiny room in a new city, I am nothing but glass.

So I write. I write myself a skeleton. I cry over my keyboard, I print stories that bare my soul to strangers in my workshop, I keep a stone in my pocket to hold when I don’t feel real. At a round table, my classmates take my skeleton apart.

I don’t write because I need a career or a major; I write because I want to live.

For four years, I write and rewrite bones; I write nerves and muscles and skin. Twenty-somethings look through my viscera with clinical apathy, and I hear critiques of repulsion, obsession, and indifference. In a creative nonfiction class, I listen to strangers argue which of my narrator’s qualities are the most horrible. The narrator is me.

By the end, I know how to laugh when I am reproached. I become a good writer, and I learn that the only person bound to love this self is me. At my thesis defense, I feel real. I hold 86 pages of words I wrote, and I am strong and substantial.

Who am I? I am an artist.

Now, I sit in front my computer and send emails that attempt to fashion the 83,000 words I ripped from my soul into a blunt object. I pray one of my queries will clobber an agent over the head so that this can be my career.

I do not keep swimming through this hell of authorship because I want it so badly. I keep swimming because I feel like I will drown without it. I feel like to not be a writer is to not be a person. And a writer without a reader is nothing. John Cheever said “I can’t write without a reader. It’s precisely like a kiss—you can’t do it alone.”

So even though querying is physically painful; even though it’s sucking the life out me even faster than a room full of ten-year-olds who’d rather do ANYTHING than learn grammar, I can’t give up.

Eight weeks. Twelve rejections.

I want to. But I can’t. At this point, writing cannot be a hobby or a dream. Writing is something I have sewn to my lungs.

I remember always what Lazar told me when I graduated, about being a writer. “If you don’t have to do this, don’t. If you have to, you will.”