Running From My Muse

So we were lounging in my "living room" - the sofa-and-coffee-table section of my two-room apartment - telling stories and smoking cigarettes and half-listening to the Verve on the stereo. We'd planned to catch a movie, but time had slipped away and now we were two half-drunk women sprawled across the furniture and talking about anything and everything. At some point, she got a sort of thoughtful look on her face and said, "You know, you should be a writer." I dodged with a laid-back quip about everyone thinking the same. "So," she said, smiling, "you're running from your muse."

With some kids, everyone knows what they will do with their lives. Whether by choice (parental, in most cases) or chance, some kids just do something in particular and do it well. I knew a kid who was a champion skater. He scheduled school around time at the rink and dance classes and so on and if he'd have managed to hold it together - e.g., lose the attitude - he'd have been an Olympic contender. Another kid I knew left school early every day to play the piano. A friend was a math genius who blew the top out of every test they gave him and took graduate physics classes at sixteen. Some kids are just good at things. With me, it was writing.

Writing was the core of it, I suppose, the visible result of a natural affinity for words. From the start, I was a voracious reader with an absurdly extensive vocabulary. I also had two parents who wrote and a houseful of books, which muddies the nature-nurture debate on this point.

Writing was so easy for me that I developed some terrible, if convenient, habits such as producing rambling pages of obstructively verbose and utterly fraudulent exegeses of books that bored me to the bone (with this sentence provided as an example). A standard-issue high-school teacher is unlikely to admit that he doesn't have a clue what the student is saying and will scrawl an A on the paper after four pages.

This is not to say that I loved writing or nurtured a desire to become a writer. I didn't carry a notebook around to "capture my thoughts," I didn't write for the school newspaper, I didn't have a battered copy of On The Road stashed in my backpack. I didn't actually pay much attention to writing. It was just something I could do.

You're right, I lack discipline. That's natural for me. I can play Chopin and Joplin on the piano, but I never learned to read music. I just wing it. Why work at something that's effortless?

I'll give you a reason: Doug London. He was my senior honors English teacher in high schooland the dean of academics and he gave my first paper back with an 84. I was astonished. I asked him about the grade, and he asked me to explain what the hell I was talking about in the paper. He hadn't understood it, which I expected, and he thought it was bullshit, which in fact it was. At the end of the year, I turned in a 25-page short story in Flannery O'Connor's southern Gothic style and got a 98. It was a triumph.

But not enough to lead me to pursue writing in college. I decided to bewilder everyone by studying biology instead. I had to learn a new style of writing for scientific papers, which was interesting; I'd always been accustomed to the journalistic style of intro-content-recap, or "tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them". (A side note: add an attention-catcher opening and a punchy closing and you've got a basic shrink-wrapped model for papers: just fill in the blanks.)

At various times in my adult life, I've attempted to write journals, screenplays, and two ill-fated novels. The only item I've written in which I take genuine pleasure is a little opinion piece I did for a graduate class. If I'm a writer, I'm a sprinter, not a distance runner, apparently.

This is an opinion enthusiastically espoused by my mother, who wrote (and sold) freelance articles for newspapers and magazines for years. What's bothering her is the idea that I would publish something for free on the web instead of sending it to a dozen newspapers across the country and seeing who sends me a check. Capitalist that I am, I admit she's got a point.