The Craft

The Craft

by Nessreen

"There's only one way to become a writer," they all said. "Write."

Alright, I said. Close all tabs, open writing topic generator. 

"More Than Friends," the website blinked once. "1,000 words."

Right.

I wrote. 

More Than Friends

It was a funeral. She was uncomfortable. She knew no one, probably no one knew her. But that's alright. People are generally accommodating at funerals, even to – especially to – strangers that show up. These strangers who come to pay respects. After all, what's the worst that could happen when someone has just died? Nothing can upstage death, not even another one, you could suppose. So everyone is assumed to have been friends with the deceased. For the sake of the funeral.

But they weren't friends.

They met years ago at her first job. She worked for a rich woman – tidying up her space, scrubbing her bathroom walls, lining up her perfume bottles on the vanity. "Go," her mother had told her before she took the job. "It's a great opportunity. You're one of the very few lucky ones. I wish I'd been given this chance when I was your age."

And here, I stopped. 

Wait a minute, I said. Is it just possible that I'm actually not as big a fan of writing as I think I am? Because that wasn't fun. I did not enjoy that. 

What is it, do I dislike creative writing? What is that yucky, yucky feeling I get when I have to create something with words?

It's not the ache on my right wrist as it rests awkwardly on that empty space on my laptop keyboard, nor is it the now-dull pain I feel as I grip a pen and write on my hordes of corporate swag notebooks – pages and pages of feelz that I'm just so embarrassed to have produced. 

That yucky feeling is failure manifest – the embarrassment of being so high school about writing. I despise it. I literarily spit on it. It's something I'm fighting to reconcile. 

Creative writing and blogging both give me that same feeling of unworthiness. It feels meaningless and so lacking in purpose. In fact, after years and years of reading on the topic of writing, I find that there's a reason this is true: it's because unlike, say, (magazine) feature writing, I do almost no research for either one. 

There's no discipline, no direction except for "writing moods" – those ones we were wrongly told were called our "innate talent". All those people who have told me how good I was at writing, they've only enabled this utter lack of skill. 

Like those children whose parents continually praised them, setting them up squarely for failure. 

I was led to believe that writing and story-telling was a gift I had, and all these years, I've been forgiven for my disregard for it, that casual waving-it-off and putting-it-on-a-shelf-for-when-I-need-it-later. It's okay, this blatant disrespect for the craft, because when I do get around to producing something, how glorious it always is.

And the result is that it never, ever is. The result is this inability to produce anything beyond something chuckle-inducing at best, and something so painfully lacking of depth at second-best.

Actually, there is only one way to become a writer, and that is to respect it. Respect it enough to give it your time and effort, to perfect it as best you can. Respect it on its own and not as an extension of yourself, not yet, and especially not if you don't respect yourself. 

Respect it as a craft that is bigger than your dear-diary emotions, something much, much grander than feelings of failure and facelessness, and lack of inspiration.  

~ END ~

Nessreen's struggle is real. Read more of her posts HERE.