For so long now I’ve been asking the question, “Why can’t I write anymore?” It’s a daunting question that has led to every sort of blame possible, but even when those things were true, not much of that was useful. Maybe I’ve just been asking the wrong questions. Let’s take it back to basics – why do I even want to write? Let’s begin at the beginning.

Nearly every child create stories, writing them down is just the next step. To me, they seemed more real on paper, giving the characters existence. I’m sure I first wrote stories in school as assignments, but then began to write them by myself, for myself. I have no idea when that happened, it just did. I remember being in the car as a kid and creating a story in my head about a family of bears who drove a flying car to Chicago in order to visit the Sears Tower. I wasn’t creating it for some specific and – to get published, get praise, etc. – I did it because imagining it was fun, coming up with who they were, what they did, how they overcame challenges – it was FUN. When I got home I wrote it down and they became real. As a lonely child, it was also a way to pretend that I had friends, and from there came the idea of writing as wish fulfillment.

I spent lots of lonely hours, in which I’d write of things I’d want to do and people I’d want to do them with. My characters couldn’t reject me or laugh at me like real people did – unless I had them do so just to triumph over them, setting up straw men to make myself feel better. I wrote hundreds and hundreds of pages of basically wish fulfillment. It was an outlet (especially as a moody teenager) but it also became an arena where I began to feel clever at times. Again, these were only for me, and so the satisfaction was pure enjoyment, untainted by worries of what others would think, or the question of if it could be sold. It was writing for the joy of writing.

Enter girls. When I struck out with them in real life I could write different endings. Eventually I began to try to use writing to impress girls in real life, becoming bold enough to try to put my skills to work using the written word in order to woo, in a world where that’s rarely done anymore. I occasionally wrote poems and stories not just about, but for girls.

Sometimes I began to write whatever came to mind – it wasn’t wish fulfillment, it wasn’t to woo, it was back to investigating people and what they would do in different circumstances – like the bears and the Sears Tower. I experimented listening to different music to see what images it would bring up and write from that, or I’d lay in the dark and come up with a single sentence, then build an entire story around that. I guess it was based on the idea that there are worlds within us that we are blind to, but if we’re quiet enough they’ll show themselves.

The tipping point, however, was reading Gatsby in high school. Never before had I realized that that was something you could do with language. Actually, it was that book as well as Peter Pan. J.M. Barrie and F. Scott Fitzgerald both had a command of language that was fascinating well beyond the plots of their novels. It was beautiful and I wanted to create beauty like that too.

So what do we have?

  • Fun
  • Wish fulfillment
  • Wooing
  • Beauty for beauty’s sake

My writing culminated, I suppose, in the combination of those four things, before it got so jumbled up in ideas of publication, agents, critics, etc. etc. I loved writing and wanted to do it all the time, so declared myself a writer. But by doing so I also greatly complicated, and hurt, my actual ability to write. Perhaps I need to stop thinking of myself as a writer, that is, if I want to actually get back to writing again. Maybe it became too much of an identity to get wrapped up in and in so doing changed the very nature of the process. Maybe I just need to think of myself as someone who loves to write, for those four reasons, instead of as a “writer.”

There, that feels lighter already. I’d rather be able to do the thing then be called and thought of as the thing. To get all those ideas of “being a writer” out of my head in order to make room for the stories to flow once more. As so often, it seems unlearning is the key to moving forward.