What If I Actually Picked up a Pen?

I once cold-called a literary agent. I had a manuscript in hand that I’d been working on for over a year—I thought it was ready to go and wanted to shop it around (before you ask: it was awful). So I found this woman’s name, took a deep breath, and placed the call from my freshman year college dorm room. Her husband answered and kept me on the phone for nearly an hour talking about the upcoming Michigan versus Notre Dame game. I stayed on the phone, hoping that I could perhaps get a call back from his literary agent wife (who was not in at the time, apparently). I never got a call back, but I certainly remember the football conversation and I’m kind of amazed at the fact that 18-year-old me was a sight braver than 30-year-old me. I haven’t attempted fiction in a serious manner in a long time.

These days my writing consists of blog posts and emails to wedding vendors. On the Knot message boards (yes, I participate; bite me, it’s fun) I frequently say that my weekend will consist of running, reading and writing. Two-thirds of that statement is almost always 100% true. The writing sometimes doesn’t get done unless you count those emails and some board posts.

I would like to start writing seriously again. If the wedding planning process has taught me anything, it’s that I’m very capable of focus when it comes to a task that’s fun—and writing can be very, very fun. However, wedding planning has also taught me that it’s easy to get caught up in frivolous details that only I will notice, leading to a time suck that takes away from any kind of motivation I may have had to write that weekend. And really, if I want to write creatively, I just need to sit down and do it. The first things are going to be dreck—no one can bounce back so quickly from a long fit of writer’s block—but I just need to try.

Early in the week I received an email from someone in New York hoping to interview me on a paper I wrote for graduate school. Amazingly enough, the paper has gotten a lot of play since it was posted by my professor for all to see (before you get all excited for me: everyone’s was). A quick search on the paper or my name (actually, my name spelled incorrectly) will yield some citations. Another paper I wrote for that same class also gets some attention as mentioned not too long ago on this blog. So that proves to me that I can write for an audience, and write well, when I’m focused, have a vested interest in the subject, and have been consistently writing. Could I produce such a paper these days? Probably—I’ve never had trouble synthesizing information and communicating it to a specific audience—but it’s the creative writing that really gets my panties in a bunch. How do I synthesize that information for fun and make people pay attention? I don’t know and part of me is afraid to even begin to try.

But really, I should. I should start writing. I should set aside time during the weekends to just write “what if” scenarios. Who cares what comes out at the other end of the pen (or keyboard, as it were)? For now, it can be for my eyes only. Later, I can let IP take a gander once I feel like I’ve got something solid written. Would I go further? Only if I feel something is especially strong. But that’s not the goal at the moment—the goal at the moment is to begin writing, like my 18-year-old self wrote: consistently.

It may not get me anywhere but at least it has the promise of being fun and making me feel like I’m doing something important for myself.