Just like Jay-Z ...

I’m back. Except, I think I was gone a lot longer than Jigga ever was.

You might notice that my absence corresponds rather well with a typical fall semester of school and there’s a reason for that, of course. But now, while not being completely finished, the bulk of my class work is finished, and here I am again.

I have to admit, it’s not that I was so busy 100% of the time that I couldn’t blog, far from it in fact. But this semester I was enrolled in two literature classes, which turns our to be a hell of a lot of reading, even when you can skim or skip a few books that you’ve read previously. But, again, it wasn’t that I was too busy … I was just unmotivated.

One thing I have learned about myself in recent years is that I’m a writer. That is, I’m not someone who can write, or who writes well, or who uses writing as a particular tool to solve this issue or another. Nor does it mean – God knows – that I actually make any money from writing. I used to think that when I was depressed, if I could force myself to write that it would help to cheer my mood. In fact I had it backwards: it’s not that writing cheers me up necessarily, it’s that not writing makes me depressed. And if there’s one thing that can keep me from writing too much, it’s reading.

This is, I know, kind of a terrible thing to say. A writer has to read, has to really fucking love reading, if he wants to be a good writer. This I believe absolutely. By the time I reached high school I understood – mostly intuitively, though I was able to break it out if needed – a lot of the basic underlying conventions of writing in different genres. It shocked me that so many of my peers – and when I here use the term peers I’m not referring just to other high school students, but to those who were in AP English classes with me and many of whom were way, way smarter than me – flat out didn’t get this stuff. Even some of the good writers didn’t same entirely capable of functioning outside of the convention 5-paragraph essay. I learned all this from reading; not reading anything about how to write, just reading. I read newspapers and saw how that kind of journalistic writing is different from magazine journalism, and how features are different from news, and how and when it’s OK to let opinion slip into writing. Surely I wasn’t born with any of this knowledge, though I may have been born with a brain receptive to it – I just read all the time as a kid. It wasn’t until college that I learned that reading could be a problem, too.

Throughout junior high and high school, I wrote all the time. Awful, trite crap and silly stupid shit, yes, but I just wrote and wrote and wrote. I loved it so much that during my sophomore year of high school it occurred to me that – outside of writing books, which, let’s face it, doesn’t pay the bills – one of the best ways to get paid for being a writer was journalism. I was good at journalism, both writing and editing, because I understood it. The problem was that I kind of hated it (mostly the reporting). So, even though one of the reasons I was interested in UA to begin with was their strong journalism program, when I went to college I enrolled as a creative writing major. And then I promptly stopped writing almost altogether.
Well, that’s not entirely true. I was writing a lot. I had papers to write all the time and all kinds of interesting and not-at-all interesting stuff to read. I didn’t stop reading for pleasure, but I surely cut it back a lot. And as I spent more and more time thinking about academic topics, I spent less and less time allowing the creative side of my grain to make up stories.

I graduated with a creative writing major and barely wrote anything creative in all those four-plus years. Everything that I finished in that time was required of me for a grade. Nothing was longer than 30 pages or so. And most of it was bad. I mean, I was an OK writer then, though four years have made me a better writer now so that I sometimes wince to read some of my old stories, but the stories themselves were just uninspired. You can tell they were forced. There’s nothing behind them, even when they’re (mildly) clever, or (almost) have a plot. Almost all of that fiction (and even some of the “creative non-fiction”) was banged out in the wee hours of the morning mere hours before it was due to be turned in. Every writer runs up against deadlines, but I was pathetic.

The only two stories I’m at all fond of that I wrote in college were both conceived – if not written – while on vacation. One takes place in London, where I went on vacation during my sophomore spring break. The other takes place in an unnamed city but was a re-inspired version of a story I had worked on in high school that came back to me while I was in Hawaii. I wrote something recently (which I will probably post here sooner or later) about the very great extent to which travel and foreign places inspire me. It’s not that I can’t commit to a story and let writing it become a part of my daily life. In high school I was good at that, and over the past 2+ years I have learned the skill again. But when much of my life becomes devoted to some other kind of pursuit – generally school – the creative side of me atrophies. In those times, it seems only travel is particularly effective at breaking my stupor (London and Hawaii in college, a weekend trip to California this fall).

I always want to write. As I said earlier, not writing tends to put me in a bad mood. But there are times when I have much else to do that I find I can’t force it – and that if I were to try, I would be forcing it. At these times, even my recreational writing (what there is of it) gets vaguely academic – see the aforementioned essay about me, travel and writing, and another literary critique of Lemony Snicket that I’ll post here as well.

The good news is that the semester is over, more or less. The bad news is that winter session starts in a week or two. But at least I’m blogging again.