saving ink

I hate that question. And I hate the way most writers answer it. “I was six years old and couldn’t stop writing stories about Superman in the red leather journal I had swiped off my father’s desk…” There’s always that level of detail that no actual six-year-old would have remembered. When I was six years old, I wanted to be wall ball champion during recess. When I was seven or eight, I could have probably said I wanted to be a professional reader, because between wall ball and riding my bike and playing in the dirt like every kid did, I was reading a hell of a lot. But the occupation “writer” never popped into my head - it was always “archaeologist” or “astronaut” or “FBI agent”.

I’m 29 years old and I still don’t know if I want to be a writer. I know that out of all of the things I’m decent at, that’s the thing I enjoy most, most of the time. I know that others have earned a living this way, and with a little luck I have a reasonable shot of joining their ranks. But I don’t know if I want to be a writer. I know that I would like some more coffee right now. I know that I want to go for a bike ride later today. I know that I want to find ways of working that are both enjoyable and keep me from starving or being stuck in one place. But I don’t know if I want to be a writer, all of the time.

There are days when I want to be a pilot. There are days when my inner 12-year-old comes out and I want to be a crime-fighter. There are days when I’m confident that if I get a little bit better at Wordpress, and if I could just get a good grasp of JavaScript, I could be a web designer. There are days when writing is the hardest thing in the world and I couldn’t get 500 words out at gunpoint. There are days when the words just spill out with little or no provocation.

The truth is, there is no when. Writing is something you do, in between eating and sleeping and just trying to get by in the world with as much freedom as you can wrangle from those who want to take it from you. No one becomes a writer because they want to write every waking hour of the day, just like no lawyer spends every minute practicing law and no doctor spends every minute saving lives. In a world with limited possibilities, it’s just one way to live, and it seems like a pretty decent option to me.