It’s taken me a long time to call myself a writer. Even now, after almost nine months of writing basically full-time, I always hesitate.
How does it work, you know? I mean, does the fact that I have a sprig of rhubarb planted in my herb garden make me a farmer?
I don’t think so.
Does it make me a gardener? Maybe. Just as much, perhaps, as these weeds do, and my gardening gloves– holey, sodden, muddy, lying over the railing for the better part of a week, abandoned there because I have writing to do.
I am a homemaker. I can call myself that. And this, despite the fact that I have three (3) baskets of clean laundry waiting to be distributed and put away, all of them waiting at the foot of my unmade bed– unmade because I have writing to do.
Am I already a novelist because I have written a novel? Am I an author now? I have a writer friend who claims I was a novelist as soon as I lifted the pen to begin– but I’ve begun so many things in my day. It doesn’t seem fair to credit the beginning of a thing.
Maybe I am a writer because I just endorsed a check. Signed my name on the debit card receipt. Sent a card to a friend. Is one a writer because she can write? because she does write? occasionally? when the spirit moves her? because she wants to?
And then am I more of a writer because I care (oh, I care) about syntax and rhythm in sentences, and making words like “etiolate” and “senescence” part of my working vocabulary?
I have volumes (and volumes) of journals– too many to bother to count, begun when I was thirteen and continued even to this day, to this very morning thirty years later, where I scrawl my prayers to God– one of which is that my writing (can it be?) might be something that brings glory to Him.
It would be sad to spend so much time doing something that doesn’t.
Or am I a writer because there is a part of me that very firmly believes that nothing (truly) has happened until it has been written down?
Maybe I am a writer because I abandoned my writing to write this– a little, brief blog post, like sucking on a candy when the whole of my working days is legumes and vegetables: the novel, the novel, the novel. I just now finished editing the very big awful chunk in the great big middle, the eight or so chapters that absolutely had to be re-worked. Just now I finished that– but it’s too early in the day for champagne.
And shortly– so shortly– I will sit down to read the whole thing, beginning to end, and make the adjustments it so desperately needs. But hardest part (I tell myself) The Hardest Part Is Over.
May 15th: that’s five days. I send it to my editor on May 15th.
Does that make me a writer?
I want to be a writer. I really, really do.
