When I was 15, I wrote a short story. It wasn’t very good. But as a first story, it was awesome.
I showed it to three people, desperate for validation. They were all concerned about how violent it was, and even in those pre-Columbine days, I set off alarms, and ended up with a visit to the guidance counselor as a result.
It didn’t stop my writing, but it did stop me from showing it to people. I wouldn’t share anything I had written on my own for another 16 years, when I wrote my first blogpost on my first blog. I’ve only been writing in public ever since. To be clear, I do have a motley collection of half-assed ideas and tidbits scattered in both physical notebooks as well as digitally – should I ever hit the big time and some future archivist wants to delve into my papers, she will have her hands full.
But for the most part, I write in public. Maybe it’s wanting the validation, the oooohs and ahhhs, the “that’s amazing” that 15 year old Hugh was seeking from those trusted adults. Or maybe it’s lack of confidence, my unwillingness to trust my own opinion.
But I prefer to believe that we all have things deep inside us that we don’t share and don’t talk about, and because we dare not speak of them, we think we are the only ones who feel these things. My hope – in this rationalization of mine – is that if we can be even slightly vulnerable and share a sliver of our experience of those things, then the people who read those stories feel slightly less alone, and the world becomes an incrementally kinder place.
And I want to live in a world that is somewhat kinder than the one in which I currently reside. So I share my stories.
Yeah, it’s either that or lack of confidence.
In any event, I love to write, and to write in public.
In a bit more than 10 weeks, I will turn 52, and have been pondering things I have done, and things left undone. I have written a couple thousand blog posts, many of which are lost to history and the ephemerality of the internet, written before I learned to save what I wrote in my own archive.
The undone list is longer, filled with things I thought I would have done, and have not.
Had kids. Been to Europe. Ran a marathon. Written a novel.
Not that I now wish I had ran a marathon, for example. 51.9 year old Hugh hates to run. It’s just that 22 year old Hugh, who ran 20 miles most weeks, would have assumed it would have happened by now.
I also thought I would be a “writer” by now.
If you ever want to start a fight on the Internet, announce your definition of who is a writer, and who is not. I make a portion of my living from my writing, thanks to my Members. In fact, I make more per year from my writing than most people who will publish a novel this year will.
But when people say, “He is a writer”, they don’t mean the guy who writes ad copy for cigarette companies, and neither do they mean a stocky, introverted, middle aged man with a newsletter read by less than 5,000 people and a sporadically updated blog filled with comfort food recipes, aborted dreams, and sad memories.
Instead they mean someone whose things can be ordered from Amazon, who has maybe won some literary awards, and probably has an agent. Maybe we will see your stuff in The New Yorker or more likely, The Atlantic after The New Yorker passed on it. You were probably interviewed on obscure podcasts to talk about your book, and people love to talk about your “voice”. And, hopefully, when you die, there are people who never knew you that are sad you are gone, and who will lament the fact your voice has been silenced.
I’ve never been that kind of writer. But part of me wishes I was. Another part of me wants to try it. To put out some queries. Seek freelance work. Enter some things in some contests. Try to get an agent.
You know – be a writer.
I’m thinking about it.