Useless Questions

Last week I spent a day in my favorite useless pastime-- wondering if, in fact, I was a writer at all.  I tentatively investigated jobs that had nothing to do with writing or teaching.  I thought about other possibilities.  Nursing? No. I hate sick people. Lawyer? Bah. I hate litigious people. Marketing? OK, bottom line-- I pretty much just don't like people. I like student people, but mostly because I don't see them too much and they seem at least nominally interested in books and rhetoric and writing and the crazy shit people say and do.

Elizabeth McCracken came to give a reading at a university I attended, and she gave a small Q and A afterward for the graduate students.  She said that her biggest regret is that she spent so much time wondering, worrying, if she was a writer.  That once she stopped asking that question she was suddenly producing a lot of writing. Like books of writing.  Since then, I've tried to remind myself that the question, at this point, is moot.  I've been writing since I was four years old (a plagiarised copy of a book about a puppy-- I simply changed the puppy's name and kept all the other words the same. My technique has evolved since then). I remember sitting at a typewriter at the dining room table and pounding out my own version of The Boxcar Children, then later poems and short stories by the dozen. It's not that I chose writing.  I write, as has been famously said by many famous writers, because writing chose me.  I write because I have no other choice.

It's not just that I write stories.  I write my whole life. I write letters because I know in a letter I will get everything I want to say in.  When my partner and I were first together we would argue through email and text-- hashing out those small things you never realize you're going to have to hash out once you settle into the long run.  He indulged in my desire for written communication, though I know it boggled him-- he's not a writer, but, luckily for me, he, like I, doesn't much go for verbal discussions either.  When I'm not writing I'm writing in my head.  Just give me a comfortable seat and a blank wall, and I'll stare at the wall for hours. I have whole books in my head, several to choose from, and I just write them inside my brain. When I get bad news I write the whole story out in my head-- how will this play out? What if I revise? What if I change this or that?

I have another useless question. Am I a bad mother? It's similar to the writer question, because, like, dude, you're in the fire. At this point you fight the fire and don't worry too much about the hard questions. I'm a mother.  I'm a writer. It's a given-- I have to do the best I can do. The questions (and answers) are eerily similar.