I’m amazed by the gret quantity of writers there is today. Something inside of me longs for that activity, so known and familiar once, that seems to have elated.
Ideas to write. What an amazing thing to have. I used to write a lot when I was small. Then I would write some more when I was in my teenage years. But all of a sudden, ideas stopped coming, and if they came, I had lost in execution.
I have debated myself over and over about it. But you used to write! Seems the all-time internal chant. It is as if something inside of me is asking for continuity in hobbies. To stop the trial and error of new hobbies and side hustles, and come back home.
But how many writers are there? Even those that say that never thought about writing until well into their 50s. Makes me wonder if I will ever be a writer, as I always thought, and makes me a little bit envious of those who write.
Writer. What a marvelous word. I’m writing, therefore I must be a writer. But there are a lot of writers, and it doesn’t seem to be anything in my writing better or even equal to their writing.
I used to have have a lot of imagination, writing continuously a new book, a new short story, a new idea. I didn’t even need to research, but when I did, I would begin a huge project of reading books and information on the internet. It seemed like something familiar. Something to call mine. A room of one’s own!
With the huge volume of content and information being written, seems impossible to enter this world of webpages and books, agents and copywriting, marketing, SEO and user experience.
I thought I was a writer, and then one day, I realized I ahdn’t written anything for years, that I was no better than anyone at it, that I didn’t seem to have any more ideas, and most importantly, that I didn’t feel the passion for writing anymore.
A place that I have thought to be my territory, suddenly seemed distant and unfamiliar. Why do people even write books for anymore? There are too many books, and so little time, and I don’t even find the content of the books that interesting anymore.
I was amazed at asking myself, what is the purpose of reading fiction? Why do we read fiction? What for? I had become what Antoine de Saint-Exupéry called an ‘’adult’’ with distain in ‘’The little Prince’’. An adult with no time for senseless activities that did’nt translate inmediately into meaning or numbers. A shallow adult, that questioned even the meaning of books. Something previously unimaginable.
But not only had I started questioning the very thing I had most loved, I also was questioning it. How come I am not to be a writer? I have considered it my thing, my niche, and it felt like losing something so familiar.
Writing has become an urgency, a search for answers. There is something in writing that can’t be found in anything else. It is the expression of ideas, the communication, the insights, the ideas. I feel like I’m in some kind of race against myself. I have titled the race ‘’The quest for refinding the meaning in writing’’. Well I don’t call it like that, but you get the idea.
I these biographical meandering, I have asked myself hundreds of times if there were some signs that I would be a writer, as I thought. I sure did write, and I sure was passionate about it. But was there any signs that I would become a writer for sure? Isn’t everyone well ahead of the game? Doesn’t it seem like they have it well together, while I’m just sitting here wasting my time?
What is my stance? I’m writing about the sadness of not writing. I open myself to the world to say ‘’I’m a failed writer’’. What an horrible point to make. I don’t even have advice, but it occurs to me, a great idea. What if there was a community of failed writers? We could all write about the failure of our dream (the act of wanting to write but not being able, not knowing what to write about or being unable to compete in the world of the internet, with thousands of writers with a lot of followers)
Or we could write about our feeling of deserving to be writers because we dreamed of one day becoming one, and how a lot of those that are so famous are not even that good to begin with. We could claim our position as writers from a stance of being sick of not realizing our dream.
People would follow us in commiseration, sending encouraging words: ‘remember that J.K. Rowling was rejected by all publishing houses until she found one editor that accepted Harry Potter’. We could go on to compare ourselves to failed Harry Potters, and we would ask ourselves ‘but what is fiction even for?’ and rebel in our disdain.
Moreover, we would also celebrate the fact of finally being writers, even for being writers that write about not writing. We would rise to the amount of followers The Writing Cooperative has, and would disdainfully think, who is the writer now?
I don’t think it is a good idea to want to be a writer for the sake of it. You either are a writer or you aren’t. What sets you apart is the act of writing, of putting work in your research, and delivering articles or books or instruction manuals or tags. But this dream dies hard, and so I write about not writing with the sole purpose, in the end, to write.
