Marissa said: I still am interested in hearing about when people knew they, too, could be a writer, or in people who are not sure they can, because my life is not like that and hasn't been.
I've always known I could be. And thus intended to be.
Always, in this case, only extends back to really falling in love with reading, because I don't think I had a very formed consciousness prior to that.
My mom wrote, and was locally published in a college lit mag when I was 6. I think it made the necessary impression.
But...
Att the beginning of Little House on the Prairie--my first non-Dr. Seuss, non-Little Golden Book--there's a sentence that says something like, "A long time ago, when your grandparents were little..." or something ridiculous like that. I remember thinking "Awfully presumptious, to think you know how old my grandparents are, lady." (Not in those exact words.) I remember also thinking, how could she know who was actually reading her books?
That's really when I knew.
When did I stop writing poetry? When I decided I was no good, or when I decided there was no money in it, or when I decided that I wasn't going to be a literary critic? I don't know. I occasionally scribble something down, when there's a prompt, but I just haven't felt it in my soul in years.
M'ris talks about the death of magic, and it provoked some thoughts, but they were all intellectual. Only today, when I was wondering if I should bite the bullet and move the poetry blog archives over to Movable Type or just delete them altogether, did it really hit home. The only real reason I could see to keep any of my poetry on-line was because I really like the graphic I made for the poetry blog. The poems themselves, I still like well enough to call friends, but I don't know if I need other people to prod at them and make fun of them or any of the rest of it... and it's not like they're going to get significant brothers or sisters in the future.
And that was the click. Poetry is dead in me, I thought. The magic of it died. It stopped being important in degrees, and now it appears to really be gone.
Then I stopped being maudlin and realized, well, mostly the inspiration to create poetry has been subsumed by fiction.
And that's a much bigger realization than it seems, at first.
Hold on, it's going to get self-indulgent for a moment.
I've wanted to be a writer since Laura Ingalls Wilder and Anne of Green Gables and Emily of New Moon and Jo March wanted to be writers. My first icons happened to have that in common, so I adopted it. At least, I think that's where it came from. In any case, I started writing stories on my own initiative when I was 7. I remember impressing my teachers year after year with my motivation and creation. I saved up my dog-walking money when I was eleven and bought a typewriter. I knew what I was, who I wanted to be.
I remember the first poem, the first non-school-assigned poem, that is. It was well-received, and easily produced. I kept writing poems. I wrote fewer short stories. Mostly fables. I started a number of novels. Never finished. But poems I could do. During this, my first tenure as a writer, I considered myself a novelist, but mostly wrote poems. I can be forgiven, I'm sure, since I was not even yet a teenager.
And then I became a teenager, but I still wrote poetry and still didn't write very many stories, short or novel-length. All my first school-published works were poems. I didn't have any stories that I thought anyone should see. Ever.
So I was a poet. I didn't call myself a poet, but I look back, and I think, yeah, I was. I wrote dozens of poems every week. Also, looking back, I realize that I revised poems. Whew. That's a pretty big revelation.
I went to poetry workshops! I didn't even have enough fiction to workshop, so when the various young writers' things came around, and someone, my mom or a teacher, encouraged me to go, I had to workshop my poetry instead. Still, didn't call myself a poet. Still called myself a writer.
Then, the Dry Spell.
Not super-dry. Ultimately, I never did stop writing, and I certainly didn't give up the illusion that I was a writer (I was one of those people I know Lisa can't stand: "Oh, you're a writer? I've always wanted to write...") I just wrote different things--gaming fiction, but also gaming poetry. For that six or ten year period (depending on how you want to count it), I had abandoned all other methods of creation: if it wasn't game-inspired or assigned for school, I barely touched it. In retrospect, I call that the non-writing time.
The Writing Renaissance came late. How old am I, anyway? I feel thirty, maybe thirty-five, but I have to remind myself that is truly not the case. I'm firmly in the middle of my late twenties. Anyway. The Writing Renaissance came, but the poetry didn't come with it.
I find myself confused. Where did it go? Did I kill it with gaming? Did I kill it with disuse? Did academia have a hand?
Or, do I just possess a finite daily quantity of talent and creativity? Such that with all my powers of concentration brought to bear on murmuring statements like "the subletter of my subletter is my subletter" while typing furiously, I have nothing leftover for gentler, more refined writing? Or, are the mindsets appropriate to a writer of humorously-veined spec fic and a composer of ethereal poetry just too far apart?
I've certainly talked about it enough that you'd think I care.
I'm not sure I do, after all.
As my mom says, when she doesn't know how to define something: "It is what it is."
Yes. It is.