I was an avid reader growing up. I could zip through a 300-page book in just under 24 hours. I spent my allowance on dime-store novels from the pharmacy. I usually had $20, which meant that if I purchased smartly, I could afford 4 books. At yard sales I could get a paperback costing anywhere from $0.10 to $1. Sometimes I would get a discount for buying 10 or more.
Looking back, it’s no surprise I became a writer. During undergrad, I thought about becoming a journalist when I took a journalism course and found it very interesting. But then I looked at the average starting salaries of English and Journalism majors. $20,000. Tuition and room & board were $24,000. The average starting salary for Business and Finance majors was $32,000.
I would write on the side.
Each writer, I believe, creates a process for writing, and it’s one that he must discover. My graduate school experience was about finding my process, and, accepting that it was different to the processes that I had already developed.
I wish that I could tell you that I studied for my MFA because I wanted to write like Hemingway or Hawthorne, or how I would’ve learned to write had I stuck with Journalism, but I’d be lying if I said that was my primary motivation.
The writer that I have become is not who I envisioned I would be. Graduate school taught me that the most important trait of a writer is to always remain open. And to respect the process, whatever that may be to you. With some growing pains, I’ve outgrown some of the story ideas that used to draw me to the keyboard. I now type with a little more trepidation, and a lot more care. I keep a vocabulary list—something I’ve not done since grammar school.
I’ve slowed, but in a sensible way. I recognize the gaps in my stories and no longer fill them with ready-made phrases or clichés. I stop and let a day or two pass instead of hurrying to write the first thing that fills my head.
It means that I’ve had to gain a considerable amount of patience.
As a writer, the most important question is not why, but how. The why is for the reader to figure out, but the how is where we writers learn from one another.
I now watch TV asking how I would render that scene in a novel? What words would I choose; would I do anything differently? Is that a scene that can only exist in visual media?
I’ve learned that not all scenes should be written.
I read somewhere, and I wish I could remember where, that today’s writers write visually because the TV has become so pervasive in our lives. The author said that modern writers don’t know how to write for reading anymore.
For some reason that comment stuck with me, and the more I think on it, I’ve come to the opinion that writers evolve. It’s not necessarily a bad thing that we write visually. (If we assume that his comment is correct.) All that’s important is that we continue to produce art.
Perhaps the point of graduate school was to make me more introspective, to think about what I’m writing and how I go about it. The answers are irrelevant.
