I’ve always felt a little illegitimate. I discovered I wanted to be an artist by observing my brother: he liked shapes in the geometric sense, and he knew all his times tables by the age of 5. It seemed a little bizarre even back then, but I didn’t mind. I was too busy experimenting with color––seeing what would happen if I mixed all of my paints together in a big blob of waste. His non-devotion to any sort of artistic pursuit made breaking the news to my thickly European dad way less painful, knowing at least one of his children had the desire to work a stable job: I, on the other hand, was more intrigued by the one-in-a-million-chance-at-success path of being a writer.
Calling myself a writer was easier then, when it was more about the “aspiring” rather than the “writer” part—everything is easier when you’re working up to it. That was high school. In college things changed (the sky is blue): all of a sudden everyone is proudly pregnant with manuscripts, door-sized Picassoes and scripts for a new and exciting ten-season science fiction series! Experiencing college as an artist is like sitting in a waiting room with a hundred-thousand-word-pound baby pressing down on my crotch. I fed this “writer” identity for years. I let the words germinate inside of me, one letter linking to the next and forming sentences, branching out into my body like new sets of nerves. Words wobbled and gurgled in my belly like gallons of water, trickled into the creases of my brain like ants. But that’s all they do. They just sit there and marinate.
Until sometimes, in the rare thirty minutes between “I’m too busy” and “I’ll do this later,” I dig for those words with my pointy nails and pick them out. I release them one by one, tumbling into a single-filed line and the story sees light for the first time. And it feels so good. But then why is it so hard? I am a writer who cannot write.
In purely objective terms, I’m more of a writer now than I ever was—I write this column (sometimes), I have a handy pad small enough to fit in the back pocket of my jeans and large enough to sustain my all-caps lettering (I always saw my mom do it and thought it was way cooler than measly lowercase), and I’ve come up with quite literally hundreds of story ideas plus a thoroughly bullet-pointed outline of a historical fiction novel. Ideas, bullets, flesh. parts of a whole that cannot stand on their own wobbly legs: “pennies at the bottom of the creek”, “rich people will do stupid shit that will almost kill them all the time”, or “man selling jams and jellies” are all cute. However, without substance these ideas sound silly. They stumble around and beg me for a crutch of legitimacy. So, for a while, when people asked what I do, I’d tell them, “I’m a writer?”, answering the question with another question, even if I had in fact written—but I had only had parts of a whole, fragments of a finished product. There was writing and there was legitimate writing. And I thought I was unable to do the latter.
The problem, I have discovered, is that I am enamoured with words. To be an artist is to understand how much you can truly love a thing, and that’s a terrifying task. I have spent months weaving a single motif into plots, chewing up and spitting out a character’s name because it just didn’t feel right, and spinning my ideas in a never-ending laundry machine of dampened stories until all my energy is consumed and the power goes out. That is a sign of love, but it is also a sign of fear—fear of letting yourself write the story and having it not come out the way you thought it would. This is why the artist’s favorite excuse for not doing work is that they need to “feel it”: the striking inspiration. No, nothing is striking you, nobody is going to make you feel. Sylvia Plath is not coming out of the oven to tap a magic wand on your head three times and feed you the words. Not everyone can just “come up” with a story, of course, but there is a difference between having nothing to say and having something to say but believing you cannot say it. I talk about being uninspired all the time, and it’s the most damning thing in the world. We allow the “Gods of Inspiration”, who are about as real as the monsters that lurk under our beds, to strip us of the agency we have over our art. Fear of failing can so often make our hands greasy and cause the things we love to slip between our fingers.
There is something so legitimate about “almost art”—what we make when we think we aren’t making anything. It might develop into a novel or stay in its true form, but it is the foundation of everything that might come. Everything, even the human body, is made of bits and pieces. But it’s a dangerous no-man’s-land. It’s the moment before the kiss, before the lips touch—a five-second ecstasy trip that is sure to sink you into the lowest of lows when it abandons you. “Almost art” can disguise itself as ambition, but if it is inconclusive it’s only the comfort zone of writers who are afraid of their art coming to life. You are a writer if you publish a novel and you’re a writer if you only have bullet points. It is the refusal to write out of fear that is the quicksand. Every piece matters. I’m not afraid to call myself a writer anymore, because I know that even my “almost art” glimmers in desire to create, which is just as legitimate as the moment of completion.
