What You Know

During my first creative writing class of my initial freshman semester in college, everything I handed in was a variation on the following theme: queer teenager with the desire to dye their hair strange colors fawns over a young gay man–unrequited love ensues. I have no idea what grade I got in that class, but I still mourn for the teacher’s assistant who had to wade through my prose.

“Write what you know,” is advice which was repeated often to me during this phase of my life. I remember complaining to my father about it when I was home from college one weekend that semester. How was that supposed to be helpful, I wondered aloud.

“I can imagine why it is so frustrating,” he said to me. “Because you don’t know much yet.” He went on to assure me the older I got, the easier it would become to write. This aggravated me even more. First, I assumed there were other writers who were immediately gifted when they were my age. Second, what was I supposed to do? Just stand around and wait to be older? My creative writing professor was apparently going to have to wait a LONG TIME for me to hand in anything good.

During my undergraduate years, I wrote volumes. I filled up spiral notebooks with poetry and musings. I wrote journal after journal full of stories. I insisted on writing everything long hand, which my father tried to counsel me against: I could write so much more in less time if I would use the computer. But my writing was largely for me: I was sorting thoughts out, navel gazing, wallowing in my tumultuous emotions.

At this same time in my life, my father was doggedly dedicated to being a writer. If he wasn’t involved in some activity which was required in maintaining his relationship with my mother, or working, he was writing. He got up early each weekend day to write. He often took breaks at work to write. He submitted to different publications and book publishers constantly. He attended science fiction conventions to listen to writers panels and share his stories with others. While he did intermittently get some short stories published, most of the time, he was met with an onslaught of rejection letters.

Watching him do all of this made me terrified of becoming so dedicated to writing. I observed him toil: draft after draft, reading the latest popular sci-fi novel to better understand new ideas in the genre, always listening for tips on how to make better submissions. If someone as smart and dedicated to writing as he was couldn’t make it work, I couldn’t imagine a world where I would be able to carve out my own space with some kind of readership.

To top it off, two months after he landed his first big book deal (he was going to have one novel published and would be contracted for two more yet to be written), he died. I begged with the publisher to go ahead with the one novel anyway, but they declined. First novels were not usually big money makers for publishers, I was informed–they would have relied on the latter two to make back their investment in my father. Dad had worked for nearly thirty years for his big break. This outcome was a cruel cosmic joke.

My own writing petered out around the same time: I had blogged for a while when I got to LA. When I moved in with the idiot who would become my first husband, he discouraged me from pursuing more of my blog, which (like this one) was largely non-fiction in nature. It was an invasion of his privacy, he said, and I should be having him preview anything I published anyway. The thought of someone censoring my writing infuriated me. But instead of dumping him, I just stopped writing.

Now it is now exactly nineteen years since I came home from my first semester at the University of Arizona to complain to Dad about my inability to write about anything interesting. He was right: I do now have more to write about than I did then. My husband-to-be is supportive of me pursuing my craft. Much like being in my first semester of college or when I moved to LA, I am once again in a critical pivot point of my life. I can’t exactly put my finger on it, but the current of possibility seems to flow when I sit down at the computer now. I also understand why my father urged me to type instead of write long-hand: with nearly two decades gone and some losses under my belt, I better comprehend the preciousness of time.

The challenge remains the same: write what you know. But now I think I might just have the wherewithal to rise up and meet it.