What They Don't Tell You About Writers

What they don’t tell you about writers is that sometimes they’re not all there. You’re talking to one. She’s nodding politely. You think she’s listening to you. Actually she’s not. She’s miles away. I’ve been writing a lot of short stories recently. That means coming up with a lot of characters in rapid succession. I need names, alright, so I was in class (not this class, I swear) and someone just mentioned the name Emma, and I thought, that’s perfect. Ordinary but with some character. I like a name that doesn’t stand out unless the character who carries it makes it stand out. I like really weird names too, but that’s a different story. So, I thought, Emma, and then I thought, who IS Emma, what’s her story, she definitely has freckles on her nose and she cuts her blond hair short and she likes…bananas. I’m not sure what the next topic in class was. It was probably very educational. Anyway.

            What they don’t tell you about writers is that sometimes more than one of them is there. This past week I’ve been about four people. One of them is a fifteen year old boy named Bobby. I’m obsessed with baseball and sort of oblivious to the fact that my sister Molly thinks she’s conversing with aliens. I’m also a young guy named Jonah who lives in a sort of medieval Wales type setting. I’m obsessed with music and writing songs and I’m falling in love with a selkie. I’m also Jonah’s friend Gwen who sings and slaps sense into people and has a bit of an alcohol problem. On the side, I have this life as a college student (do you call that a life? Or do you call it a prolonged homework session?). Sometimes, if you pay close attention, you can tell which me I am. For instance, sometimes I get really spacey and walk into the ocean in the middle of winter so I can anoint myself with saltwater and wait for a mysterious seal to appear. Bobby days are good days but they don’t happen very often. If I’m looking at you with a glazed expression in my face and my eyes are bloodshot and I show zombie-esque sings of deterioration, you’re probably looking at the “real” me.

            What they don’t tell you about writers is that they didn’t choose this. Maybe they’ve tried to quit. Maybe one year they barely wrote a word, and it was the most miserable year of their life. They don’t tell you that writers hurt, that some days every word on the page feels like another messy drop of blood that no one was supposed to see. They don’t tell you about the words that just have to come, the way thoughts on paper are like breathing and when you take away the paper, the thoughts are gone too. They don’t tell you that sometimes writing saves the writer’s life, that there’s days when a writer can’t open her eyes or get out of bed or face one more day in this body so she slips into another one, and that’s how she makes it through. They don’t tell you that a writer is a writer, they way a cat is a cat or a mother is a mother. They don’t tell you about the writer who gets up at five in the morning, before the robins start to sing, so she can steal a precious hour at the keyboard and for one short part of the day, really live.