“I want to be a writer!”
Those words coming out of a squeaky eight-year-old voice can seem trivial, like a phase.
At that time, I also most likely wanted to run a hot dog cart (why??), own a horse ranch (oof), and give birth to twins someday (absolutely not).
Oh, how the times change.
Yet after all these years, one thing hasn’t: I still want to be a writer. Sometimes, I even feel like I am one. And better? Sometimes I even believe I am one.
But can I be honest with you for a minute? Almost nothing about being a writer has been like I expected. Not at all. In my eight-year-old mind, being a writer meant telling stories and making people feel things, happy, sad, hopeful, what have you. I had barely any concept of grammar, and my handwriting was nearly illegible. But I wrote anyway because I couldn’t not do it. There were too many voices in my head, too many lovely things I wanted to capture and share.
And then, in my thirteen-year-old mind, being a writer meant working hard and learning all I could about the craft. I believed that all I needed to do was write straight through until the book was done, and then start the next one.
Please, everyone who has ever written a book of any kind, laugh with me for a moment about that one.
I wasn’t necessarily wrong, but there tend to be a few more steps along the way than that. Wrong turns, right turns, rewrites, revisions, doubts, and then you move on to the next sentence.
I had a fixed idea of being a novelist. An author. Someone readers would put on their favorites list and recommend to their friends. It felt like such a clean and simple goal.
And then at sixteen I realized, well, that’s not so simple after all, and I started looking into other ways to use the drive I had for writing to make a life for myself.
Skipping over years of this and that and the other thing for your sake and mine, I found myself sucked into the world of business writing. B2B marketing. Blogs. Social media. Web copy. Case studies. One-pagers. A few glimpses of professional fiction writing and story development here and there.
But my idea of what it meant to be a writer changed. My eight-year-old self never could have guessed at just how many ways one could make a living through writing. My thirteen-year-old self would probably call me a sell-out.
I am grateful for the work that I have—I enjoy the writing process as a given. I am blessed to be able to use my writing this way.
And yet…that eight-year-old. She wants so badly to write fairy stories and adventures. She wants so badly to draw characters and give them voices. And that thirteen-year-old—she wants to see her book on the shelf, so, so badly.
I have never stopped working on my passion projects that were once the career plans of a girl who knew less about what it takes to afford a life. They exist alongside me as part of who I am, no matter how impractical. They are the ghosts that live in my heart and mind every day, blinking at me, wondering why their voices are quieter than before.
The truth is, I gave a little here, gave a little there, and at some point, I lost sight of why I wanted to be a writer at all.
I wanted to be a writer to build fantastical stories and bring joy to others. To connect with people. To hold my beating heart out in my hand and somehow find the ones who would understand.
I think writing/reading can be a form of friendship. The constant asking of “I feel this way—do you feel this way, too?” that is a building block for most relationships. That search for validation, understanding, belonging.
Belonging. Such a simple word with such a vast weight. Almost everything we do from a young age is in pursuit of belonging or the rejection of belonging, the desire to be “different,” or the desire to fit in. Either way you slice it, it’s the center of so much strife, experimentation, and confusion.
That’s why stories are so important. They offer belonging to those who maybe don’t do so well with finding that in the real world. They are a haven, one that I wish I had found sooner.
What is endlessly amusing to me is how much I was not the classic bookish kid. I hated reading. HATED it. I wasn’t escaping crowds to read for hours, I wasn’t reading far above my grade level; I didn’t even understand how many wonderful stories were out there.
But I was still writing. Somehow. The urge was unhindered by my lack of bookish drive. I was a kid with an undiagnosed learning disability who saw books as nothing but headaches and confusing black squiggles, but I tried to write stories anyway.
Of course, as soon as I figured out the wonders of novels when I was thirteen, I became the all-consumed reader most writers start as. There was no escaping it.
There is still no escaping it. Everything I do comes back to this, and I’m not about to lie down and let doubts and fears bull me over. Even now, with so many voices telling us writers that we’re becoming obsolete, giving up is not on the table.
There will always be someone who thinks your dreams and goals are pointless; it’s unavoidable. Just don’t let that someone be yourself.
Thank you for reading! May you hug a book today, and may it hug you back.