I wrote my first short story when I was six. Maybe younger. I have it here, preserved in the neat, feminine handwriting of a teacher whose name I’ve long since forgotten. “If I were a butterfly,” it begins.
As far back as I can remember, I was complimented on my writing. I basked in the praise, and I loved to write. I slept with books instead of with toys. I bought my first Writer’s Market Guide in elementary school, and I pored over my family tree, picking out pseudonyms based on the names of my ancestors. But I had a secret. I wasn’t really writing.
I started stories. I rarely finished them. Sometimes I didn’t get past the first paragraph. Sometimes I didn’t get to the first sentence. I wrote reports for school, and I resented these pieces of required writing. “If only I didn’t have to write these book reports,” I thought, “I could be writing books instead.”
I kept a journal from 4th grade to… Well, I kept a journal. I found it recently. It’s clear I wanted it to be a record, someday when I was famous, of the little girl I’d been. I imagined generations of readers, long after I was dead, lining up to read my journals. As though I were Anne Frank. As though I were Anais Nin. It didn’t last long. I got bored with my own prose and put the diary away. I thought about it from time to time, though, and sometimes I looked at the locked diaries at the drug store. “Maybe if I had the right kind of diary,” I thought. “But not this one, the lines are too wide. And it’s got these spaces for dates at the tops of all the pages – what if I want to write more than one page one day, and less than one page the next? This will never do.”
In high school, I started journaling again. And I started writing. I carried a notebook. I wrote songs, poetry, scenes from fantastic stories. And then my friends found a description I’d written of a shattered field under a charred sky, and they pulled me out of a movie theatre (I don’t remember the film) because I’d scared them so badly. I stopped writing. My mother read my diary, and I ended up in therapy. So I stopped journaling, too.
Later, I started writing letters, letters that were never meant to be sent. It was a different kind of journal. One of my friends found one and ridiculed me for it. My future ex-husband found one and accused me of adultery. I stopped writing again.
I wrote more letters in law school, some of them addressed to friends, others addressed to the universe at large. But this time I was smart. When I’d finished them, or when I’d run out of time, I’d rip the pages from my notebook and throw them away. I wrote in cursive, rather than my usual print, and always I discarded them in a public place, at school or in a coffee shop, somewhere no one knew my handwriting, somewhere they wouldn’t be recognized as mine.
And through all of this, I wanted so badly to write. I started stories. I rarely finished them. In their place, I read books on writing. “If only I had the right tools,” I thought. “The right notebook; the right word processor; the right desk chair.” I wouldn’t write at home because I wanted to write in cafes. I wouldn’t write in cafes because I wanted to write on the computer. I wouldn’t write on the computer because I wasn’t alone in the house. I talked about writing, I dreamed about writing, but I refused to write.
Slowly, I’ve begun to see the patterns. The fear of rejection. The fear of being read. The fear of being dull. I know the critic for who she is, and if I can’t shut her out all the time, at least I can muffle her voice long enough to get a few words onto the page. I’ve begun to write.
