A Would-Be Writer's Life

the dream i once had is gone, and that's ok

I have a small callus on my middle finger. It’s been there since I was a teen, and I got it from the way I would hold my pen while writing, pressed up against the finger, gripping it like if I let go I would forget how to write.

I wrote a lot in those younger days, enough to permanently damage my writing hand. I wrote poems, lyrics, short stories. I wrote stories about horrible monsters and I wrote about love and loss - things I really knew so little about. I wrote essays and articles and one act plays on yellow legal pads and in notebooks and collected everything in box I hid under my bed. Writing was all I wanted to do, forever. Writing was how I got my fears and worries out of my brain, it was how I communicated with myself. It was a labor of love, and still is to this day. The only thing that’s changed is the dream of becoming a writer. Not just someone who writes, but a real, honest to goodness writer who pays her bills with words, whose name is known in some circles, who publishes things in newspapers and magazines.

I read as much as I wrote. Novels, short story compilations, magazines by the dozen. I subscribed to Writer’s Digest and studied the markets and thought one day I’d make it, that all my dreams would come true.

It wasn’t rejection letters that killed my dream; it was my lack of confidence, my low self esteem, that kept me from sending anything out to my favorite magazines. I acted like I was going to do that. I kept a hand-crafted spreadsheet of what magazines paid, what they were looking for, which ones were open to new writers. I asked my parents for and received a typewriter and I transcribed the handwritten stories I wanted to send out into neat, professional looking typewritten pages, double space and numbered. I memorized the names of editors. And I always stopped just short of stuffing those pages into a manila envelope and mailing it out to the editors whose names I knew like my own. I would imagine my stories sitting in a slush pile, unread, unwanted, or worse, I would imagine them being read by some junior staff member and the whole office sharing a laugh at my attempts at writing. I wasn’t good enough. I was fooling myself. Just because you love doing something doesn’t mean that you’re good at it, I would think. Just because you work your ass off at something doesn’t mean other people would appreciate your efforts. So I’d get scared and put those typewritten stories into the box under my bed. I wanted to be a writer. I felt like I was a writer, with the amount of time I spent honing my craft, but if your words are read only by yourself, does that even count?

When I was fifteen, I struck up a friendship with an older boy named Jeff who worked at the local convenience store. He was in a band, and his father was in the publishing industry. He was looking for lyrics; his father would certainly be looking for new writers, he said. At his behest - and I admittedly was smitten with him - I gathered up two boxes of my writing and handed them off to Jeff, who would surely do my work for me and make me famous. I went into the store a few days later to see if he read any of the poems and stories yet only to find out Jeff had been fired for smoking marijuana on the job. I didn’t know where he lived. I didn’t have his number. I didn’t know his last name. Two boxes filled with years and years of work were gone. I cried for three days, and then spent the rest of my life thinking about what Jeff did with those boxes. I was angry at myself for a long time. I know the teenage writing was probably not very good, but how I would love to have all my creations in my hands. I was determined to continue writing, but I felt such profound sense of loss that I vowed to never let anyone get their hands on my words again. It would all be for me.

I continued to write as I got older, but without the dream of being a full time writer, of people reading my works, of having my name known and making my parents proud. I went through a series of jobs, none of them as fulfilling as sitting alone in my room, headphones on, clacking away at the typewriter. I thought that maybe writing was its own reward, that every time I completed a story or poem I accomplished something. It’s not that I wanted to make money off my writing, it’s that I wanted to be able to create for a living, and there’s a big difference between the two.

The specter of being an author haunted me. I felt like I was wasting my life, wasting a talent I knew I possessed. I got married, had kids, made two attempts at writing a children’s book and one prolonged attempt to write a parenting book. But the same fears I had as a teenager followed me into adulthood, and I never sent anything out. I began to suspect that I didn’t just have a fear of failure, but a fear of success as well. What if I did publish something? What if it was greeted with fanfare? I’d be expected to follow up. I’d be expected to talk about it. Those thoughts filled me with dread and I stopped writing for a long, long time.

I made a thin attempt at freelancing when internet writing was all the rage. I wrote for Forbes, I had stuff published in middling online magazines, I made a bit of money. But none of it felt good. I was pushing out mediocre content, writing for page views, for Google-friendly algorithms. It felt gross and I stopped writing except for twee little essays on my tumblr.

It is a point of contention with myself that I never became a writer in the proper sense. Have I wasted my talents? Did I kill me own dream? Yea, I did. My lack of confidence, my fear of failure and rejection, my penchant for putting things off, they all played into my failure to establish a writing career. There’s a line from a Mountain Goats song that says “when you punish a person for dreaming his dream, don’t expect him to thank or forgive you” and I apply that to myself. I killed my dream. I punished myself constantly for thinking I could pull this off. I chastised myself instead of encouraging myself and stayed mad at that for a long time.

So here I am, in the year 2022, 59 years old, far removed from those typewriter days, from the days when Writer’s Digest was my bible. I’ve got this here substack where I write to my heart’s content and a couple of hundred people read what I write. I make nothing off of it, money wise. But the act of writing, the sharing of my words, keeps me going. I love doing this. I am happiest when I’m pouring words out of my head. And I am also happy when people read those words, when they tell me they were touched by what I wrote, that my words resonated with them. Maybe that’s the dream I was after this whole time. I will always wonder what could have been, what might have happened if I sent out those stories and poems, if I pursued having my novel published. And every time I think about that, I realize that maybe the writer’s life was never for me. I have to stop punishing myself for having dreams, even if they didn’t come true.

Every once in a while I run my hand over the callus on my finger and think about all that writing I did. I think about Writer’s Digest and Jeff and the characters I created and the little essays I wrote. I put a lot of myself into all that. I worked hard, I wrote hard. I was, in essence, a writer.

Thank you for being here, for sharing this journey with me, for allowing me to feel like a writer, if not a writer.