Letters to the Editor
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Maybe the label is the problem
What if we didn't worry about the question, "Am I a writer?" Everyone here is a writer, also a breather, a walker, a sitter, an eater... Sometimes i write, sometimes i don't. Sometimes i dance, sometimes not... so am i a dancer? a swimmer? how is these labels useful?
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oops
That's "how is this useful"? or "how are these labels useful?"
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And anotther thing...
It is always easier to write when you have something good to write about, and now the LW can write about the experience of being an LW, and maybe get that published in Salon and have his/her quarter hour of Warholian fame.
I would not claim to be a writer (can't you tell?), but one of my best moments was winning $500 second prize in a Christmas short story contest run by a national newspaper. I was a bit disappointed not to win the $1000 first prize, but a year or two later one of the judges, a newspaper editor who was playing for a sports team I was playing against, told me that the judges thought my story was easily the best submitted, but that some of them thought it was too good to be written by an amateur, and they didn't want to give the first prize to an entry that might be tinted by plagiarisn. Well, if you can't win, that is not a bad reason to be second.
However, he was in a position to make it up to me a bit later, when he published a series of three feature articles I wrote about my experiences as contestant on the TV show Jeopardy!. This gave me a certain amount of local recognition and my assigned fifteen minutes of notoriety.
However, there is a huge, huge difference between writing casually about things that personally interest you, and writing professionally on assignment, or to meet publishers' deadlines.
If you don't have to write to make a living, why worry about it? The desire to write may come back, or it may not. If stuff that needs to be written is inside you, it will force itself out, just like the gas in the homemade ginger beer bottle that exploded yesterday in my kitchen. It can't be suppressed, so it will find a way to ventilate itself.
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Maybe some letters are fake, but definitely not all
RastasBarques - I've had Cary publish two letters from me asking for advice. His advice was helpful, as were the comments from other people.
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I promised myself yesterday
that I wouldn't respond to any more of these "blocked writer" letters because they are currently distracting me from my own writing and my novel languishing in a Windows Word file.
But I just want to second Cary's saying that you are obviously a good writer. So you have weak spots right now? Who doesn't? I've been writing since I was eight, and I still can't do lengthy descriptions to save my life. As people have said here, writing is just like any other profession. My doctor doesn't have the best people skills, but she's a pretty good physician nevertheless. Creative people can have a perfectionist streak, it's part of their makeup. We all have to learn how to mute it - personally I suggest humor - in order to grow as writers and people.
I feel kind of presumptuous telling you what road to take with your life right now. But whatever you do, you can still write. You can do volunteer work, go to law school or move to a remote island. But writing can still have a place in your life if that's what you truly want to do.
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Out with the old
Dear LW, writing is your past.
We can never go back, we can’t return to the way things were when we had fulfillment, or what felt at the time like comfort. But sadly, while we can’t return, we can stagnate; some even die of the sadness of loss.
Moving on often seems impossible because we cannot see clearly into the future. Fretting and hovering over the carcass of the past love may seem less dangerous than stepping into the fearful void of the future – but as those who live “one day at a time” learn, the future isn’t empty, it brings new life and new loves to those who are open to them.
I have confidence that your creative impulse will well back up and brim over – as Cary pointed out, you are writing something. But you have to make room for it by brushing out the old. I’d say you made a great start by getting rid of your old writing. Keep purging, cleanse, clear clutter, give things away, turn your home into an open receptive canvas and your creativity will rise like the tide, a force of your nature, inevitable and fulfilling.
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don't push it
My mother stopped writing for a good thirty years. Then she started again. The last time I checked her name on amazon she had 19 books listed, all written after the break. Cary is correct, you'll write again when you have something you want to say.
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Separate column a good idea
A separate column for the angsty "artist" is a good idea. Personally, I don't know why there has to be a response to every artist who is in a lull, every writer who has a periodic freeze, every blockhead who doesn't understand why nobody recognizes his genius.
Please consider this my vote for an advice column that isn't about regurgitating platitudes for the oh-so-sensitive (I want to say spoiled brat) artiste who might have to get a real world job and not be jacked off by a bunch of pretentious, snotty and insufferable dorks droning on about The Ahts.
Cary, you do so much better when you talk about real things, real problems, real emotions...not this mental masturbation about the tragedy of the Muse, etc. If the "ZOMG, you don't understand- it's aaaaarrrrt!" faction has that big of a hold on your mind, two columns is the answer.
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Sometimes quiet is nice, too
I suppose I consider myself a writer, among a lot of other things -- couple of published short stories and novellas, so I even got paid for it -- but if you just define yourself as a Writer, that puts a different kind of pressure on the occasion. As many (I think wise) people have noted, you're a writer if you write stuff that you feel like writing, and if you don't feel like writing, it's probably pretty cool just to not write.
But then, "writing" isn't just words on paper, it's the way you think about and feel words and language all around you ... so maybe in your silent times, your wordless-on-paper times, you're thinking of something to write about.
Perhaps you're just a very economical writer, who puts down fewer and fewer words as you discover how to listen and speak more clearly.
Or maybe you're just fooling yourself. But only you can figure that one out.
I greatly admire Cary's writing and his abilities, but one thing to keep in mind -- Cary's an extroverted writer, and he's one of the very few extroverted writers I know. There may be tons of extroverted writers and I just know all the introverted ones, but the majority of writers I personally know are introverts, so I come from that perspective. We introverts like the quiet moments a lot, and it may be that you're an introverted writer who needs to do just what you're doing -- stepping back from your writing and doing it when it calls to you, as much or as little as it does.
I always liked what Richard Bach said about how he approached writing: "I hate writing," he wrote (or close enough) "and I won't do it until an idea comes crashing through the wall, stomps over to my desk, grabs me by the throat, picks me up, and yell in my face, 'YOU WILL WRITE ABOUT ME!'"
As for your existential crisis, I suspect it's worth much more just letting yourself experience the crisis without necessarily trying to write your way out of it. Maybe your writing will return in a much more enhance form once you've given up on it for a while.
God speed and good luck.