The Outside World

I’ve dabbled with writing since I was a junior in high school. In college, writing took a backseat to reading since I showed up as an English major with major deficiencies in my literature experience. After college, writing took a backseat to partying and shaking off the shackles of my youth. As I entered my third decade on the planet, I began to see the end of the endless good times. Something substantial would have to replace the carefree since the carefree doesn’t stay so innocent for long.

I decided to become a writer. It took me a while to realize that this needed to be an overt decision. I already wrote (from time to time), I thought about writing all the time, and I read voraciously, paying attention to writers and their world. But it wasn’t my world. It was a hobby that I expected to be more than that.On its own. It’s taken me some time to learn that in order to become something, you have to be it; you have to do it. All the time. I’d never surrendered to anything; I’d never tried to become something. I had nebulous ideas about me being a writer that I believed to be concrete facts, even if they hadn’t had their time yet. I can write; I am good at it; therefore people will knock down the door to read and publish myself. How can that not be true?!?

Over the past seven years or so, I’ve been in training. I see it in the same way as a doctor’s path to opening a practice. A doctor-to-be goes to school, takes courses, and then rotates through different aspects of the medical field. Upon graduation, she then begins to practice medicine. I am at the point where I feel I’m ready to practice my craft. I have something to say and I now know how to say it.

This is what has been so difficult for me: in order to be a writer (really any artist), you have to put yourself out there. Art of any kind is a performance. You are placing yourself out in the world and presenting your creation. Actor, writer, painter; any artist is a performer. Even writers like me who’d rather hole up in their writing spot and never speak or hear or see another human being ever again. Maybe not at the heart of it, but some part of the reason I want to be a writer is to be read. I want to be seen.

When I see a performer I like – an actor or a musician – I think about what it takes to get up and do what they do. Imagine what it is like for a top-tier musician who sells out stadiums to get in front of that audience and sing and dance with thousands of eyes on their every move. Even if they’re a natural, even if they’ve been doing it for years, that person is opening themselves up in front of other people. Their success depends in large part on people accepting and liking the performance. That whole idea gives me the fantods.

I don’t want to perform because at the heart of any performance is expression, and I have a difficult time expressing myself. Sometimes it feels like people in the outside world have a better bead on who I am than I do myself. What kind of artist doesn’t want to express himself? This one. But maybe this gets into something deeper. Maybe it goes beyond wanting and gets more into needing. Maybe I balk at the idea of putting my true self out there, but there’s something inside that’s pushing it out, that’s demanding to be let out.

I can’t find it right now, but I remember reading a quote by Ray Bradbury in which he said that he didn’t know what he was doing when he wrote his books. He just did. I’ve always been amazed by that quote since it’s logical that someone who accomplished so much couldn’t have done it without some sort of future-seeing plan. But now I get what he was saying. When I decided to be a writer, I didn’t know what kind of writer I wanted to be. I had lofty ideas in my head, but me coming to the decision to become a writer was partly borne of frustration. I’m not Ray Bradbury. I’m not David Foster Wallace. I’m not Stephen King. I’m not any of the countless authors that have spoken to me, who have lit the way. So who am I? I still don’t know, but I did find the one thing missing that could answer that question: the work. Sure, I have tons and tons of things I’ve written. Pages upon pages, books upon books, files upon files. But I didn’t have anything complete, nothing that I could say to another person, even a friendly ear: Here, this is something I’ve written that you’ll enjoy.

So I put my head down and I worked. I carved out the time and I wrote and I wrote and soon the writing took over. Soon I was thinking about it more and more, which in turn pushed me to write, which in turn pushed me to write. I had invented a perpetual motion machine.

Three months ago today, I took the picture below. I was feeling the work I was doing was useless. I felt like I was churning and fighting and grinding and changing nothing. And then I compiled the notebooks. I’d had my head down, and when I looked up I  realized I’d done something. I’ve filled these notebooks since I’ve started taking writing seriously.

There’s a lot of drivel in those notebooks, but their value can’t be seen in the picture. These notebooks represent a no rules/no consequences space for me. I can write whatever I want. I can write something that will never sell. I can write something that sucks. I can write something that might be good. I can write something that is the seed of a thing. I can express myself.

Some people are at home in front of people. I am not. But I can get myself to the point where what I’m doing, what I want to write about is more powerful than my desire to live apart from the outside world.