The Circle Game

I’ve been effectively unable to write for going on three years, since I started getting the first of many letters-of-rejection that would trickle into my mailboxes (e and snail) in the months after I finished the fourth and final revision of my manuscript. The stoppage in writing is in part the result of a schedule change: I started working again in July 2007, after thirteen months off, and in late August of the same year I began work on my M.A. in adolescent education. So for a while, anyway, there wasn’t much time to write. Moreover, I didn’t feel like I had anything to say. This was partially the result of having just recently finished a fourth revision of my longish manuscript; it’s probably natural for a writer at that point to feel that he or she has said it all. The bigger problem, though—the one that would prove more difficult to overcome—had origins not in the manuscript but in the rejection letters that followed its completion. For the first time in my career, such as it was, as a writer, I had come to doubt whether I had anything to say worth writing.                                

Writing is like going to the gym in that it’s self-reinforcing: the more you go to the gym, the easier it is to go to the gym, the more you want to go to the gym. The less able I was to write the harder it was to write the less I wanted to sit down and try to write. August 2007 became August 2008. In October 2008, I was laid off from my job. I had plenty of time to write then, but my ego, writing and otherwise, was in a shambles. In October 2009 I was neither in school, having graduated, nor on the job, having been unable to find a position as a high school English teacher. No writing happened. In March 2010 I finally got a teaching job. March 2010 became July 2010 and here I am.

If I could somehow show the above paragraphs to the twenty-two to twenty-five-year-old (or so) me, that individual would, I’m sure, be shocked and horrified to discover that I could/would go three years without producing anything substantive in the way of creative writing but especially that I would veer off the writing path altogether, career-wise, into being a high school English teacher. Because, well, at that time in my life (twenty-two to twenty-five or so) I was dead-set on becoming a Writer (capital W), and the simple fact of the matter is that English teacher and Writer are not the same thing, even if there is some overlap. Even the thirty-two-year-old me finds this discrepancy problematic, because I’d devoted so much time and energy in my younger years to writing. Also it can’t be ignored that I, on some level, love writing. Too, though I don’t think I’m a great writer, I’m a decent one, and the ability to write even decently is a kind of gift, and it seems foolish and wasteful to squander anything that could be categorized as such. Furthermore, the fact that I’m now an English teacher should only give me more incentive to write. How can I possibly expect to serve as a positive example and inspiration for my students if I myself have quit writing? How, I mean, can I ask my students to believe in themselves if I don’t believe in myself?  

So you see I’m cornered. I really have no choice but to force myself to start writing again. But, I mean: How does one go about doing that? A therapist would turn the question back around on me: What would you tell someone else in your shoes to do? And of course the answer would be self-evident: I’d tell a person in my shoes to sit down and write. Or, better yet, and please make way for the teacher me, I’d tell a student in my shoes to get out a sheet a paper and brainstorm as many prompts as he she/could and write responses on as many of those as possible. I’d recommend writing on a schedule—at X time of day for X long for X number of words. I’d suggest collecting the responses in a writing journal or blog so that they would feel like more than just a random assortment of essays—they’d start to feel like a unified work (of sorts) and, taken together, would offer to the party looking for it a kind of momentum that might prove motivating, self-perpetuating, and/or helpful in getting the juices flowing. And that is what I will try to do here.