Lucien's Lil Nook

I’ve been writing for a while, all my life if I really think about it. I used to tell people that I had stacks on stacks of journals that I’d fill with words, but that’s only partially true. Stacks of notebooks, I had lots of those, but they were mostly empty, with scribbles and torn pages, never filled to the brim with anything more than plain paper.

Writing’s something that comes naturally to me, which I want to believe is some kind of super power. It’s mostly because of how much I read as a kid. When a paper or some kind of writing project came along, the words would just come naturally from my mind and onto the page. It was easy for me to get the words out, it was the way I talked, the way I communicated. Whenever my Dad and I were to mad at each other or wanted to apologize, we’d write letters to each other. If I couldn’t scream at a friend who I felt betrayed me to the core of my being, I’d write it all down. Writing was the way I approached the world, and when it came time to practice and maybe create something out of those skills, I lost myself.

I know that people write “better” than I can, painting pictures and crafting worlds with just words. I envy that power, like it’s some divine gift when the secret’s actually just lots of practice. Learning how to do that, how to just have that kind of inner dialogue running in my mind in order to have it fly from my fingers was, in my mind, the ultimate goal of writing. And even after learning about the tedious process of drafting and revising until there was no paper left in the world, I still felt like there was a part of writing itself or being a writer that I hadn’t learned. No matter how many classes I took, hours I spent staring at the thousands of words I vomited onto a Word document, and people I had, rather embarrassingly, read the stuff I wrote, I felt like there was something missing.

This is NOT me telling the world that I’ve figured it out. I think, instead, I finally looped back around on the trail of my life, re-reading some of my older stuff (which takes a whole lot of blind courage that I was only able to muster up while sleep-deprived and stuffed with peanut butter pie), and realized that my voice had disappeared. The way I played with words was not as complicated or weaved with the aesthetics that I painstakingly hand-sewed with red-ink ball point pens. These stories had character, had a tone that made me (the person who wrote these and then completely forgot they had even existed) feel like the story was being told to me.

MY GOD, they’re filled with countless spelling mistakes and grammatical errors that would make my college professors question the validity of my English degree. On the other hand, they’re so full of life and an energy that I didn’t know my writing had. At the time I wrote those, I was barely able to read them back without needing to stab myself with a barbed knife, but maybe that was the point. Maybe, if I can read something that I just wrote and feel almost nothing or, at the very least, grit my teeth and bear it, I’m not writing at my best.

There’s this clip from Masterclass, where Neil Gaiman talks about how writing is vulnerable, that you’re putting yourself into what you write, and the more that you do, the better a reader will connect with your writing. I feel like I’m finally seeing that truth, one of those “Ah-ha!” moments, decked-out with the fedora and long smoking pipe. I’m the one shining that squeaky lamp onto the suspect, but that suspect is me, and I’m naked in handcuffs, glaring at myself.

That one got away from me a bit, but the point is that the way that I never should’ve tried to be someone that I’m not. I don’t have to write like some old, but great, out-dated writer or try so hard to emulate the best of the best because I’m too young, and it’d be naive of me to think that the way I write normally can be “good.” If I try to write like that, I get stuck on a blank page, unable to write anything because I’m working twice as hard, if not more, to transform myself into anyone else and then write a story.

So, to anyone out there who read this, if you want to write a story, just write it. Think of it as a letter to someone, or just a journal entry to yourself. If, eventually, the vision is for the story to have a different tone or a different voice entirely, then just revise it later. But in order to start writing, to get that first draft down, stop thinking so much. If it’s a story that you want to tell then you’re going to have to tell it, even if you’re a gay guy from Chicago and the narrator is an old British woman lost in the streets of Dubai. You can’t hide away from the fact that you’re still you. And the fingers that are typing on the keyboard, the hand that’s holding the pen, the mind that’s crafted these characters is most undoubtedly, and most profoundly, the reason why some random-ass stranger keeps flipping to the next page.