Writers Not-So-Anonymous: Day 1

Hi.  My name is Benjamin, and I'm a writer.  It has been 1 day since my last writer's block.

It started out as a passing thought:  Man, I really need to write more.
Which became a persistent theme:  Why am I not writing?
Which forced an introspective analysis:  Apparently, I am bad at self-motivation.
Which gave birth to an idea:  I need someone to keep me accountable.
Which led to a question:  Will someone be my accountabilibuddy?
Which yielded a volunteer.
Who made a half-joke:  It's like I'm his sponsor!
Which left me thinking . . . again.

It's really not a bad idea.  The whole idea, by my understanding, of things like Alcoholics Anonymous is that you find people who are dealing with the same thing as you.  Another part of it, someone once told me, was that it is a group of people (or at least one person (your sponsor (have I used enough parenthetical statements here?))) that you basically report to and turn to for support.  It's people to keep you accountable.

And it's brilliant.  It's something that I desperately need.

I want to write a novel.

There are not a whole lot of sentences that I can write out like that without lying.  I don't really know what I want to do with my life.  I have a few ideas of things to try, but I don't feel super passionate towards much else.

Apparently, I never did know what I wanted to do with my life.  I spent some time today thinking through what my responses were all those years that people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up.

In early elementary (Forgive my impreciseness.  My autobiographical memory is pretty shoddy.  I'll explain later.) I remember there being an assignment where we drew a picture of what we wanted to be when we grew up.  I drew a person painting (and, of course, wearing the obligatory beret) and said I wanted to be a famous artist.  Not an artist.  A famous artist.  Let's be honest, I didn't really even know what that meant.

I remember at a camp that I went to, there was one night that they made a big deal of telling what you wanted to be when you grew up and I remember my answer very vividly:  I want to be a bio-genetic engineer.  Let's be honest, I didn't really even know what that meant.  Neither did anyone else, but they all thought it sounded impressive.  I told them it meant that I wanted to work with DNA, combining it from different creatures to create new species.  I'm still not sure what the actual term means (if anything).

The last time I really remember giving any kind of straight answer about what I wanted to do when I grew up was while I was filling out college applications.  Scholarship committees want to know what you plan on doing with the money they might be giving you, so I had an answer ready for them:  I was going to get my Ph.D. and become a college professor.  Let's be honest, I didn't really even know what that meant.  But it sounded nice, and that's what was important.

I've never settled on anything for very long that appealed to me as something to do when I grow up.  That is, except for this one solitary sentence:

I want to write a novel.

I'm not sure when I first started enjoying writing.  My family has had several times in the last month where we sat around talking about the past and memories from childhood.  I quickly realized that some of my most vivid memories were of me physically alone in my room, surrounded by a horde of my invisible . . . associates.  They weren't always friendly.  My memories of my adventures on the other side of my imagination are just as vivid as (more vivid in some cases) my memories of things that actually happened.

I've always made characters and stories.  I actually used to get frustrated when I tried to play with other kids, because they had no concept of character or story.  They just wanted to run around.  I wanted to get lost on the other side.

The first conscious memory I have of thinking that writing might be something I would be interested in doing was in my junior year of High School.  In my literature class, our teacher was having us write short stories.  Somewhere along the way, a joke was made about having an awards show when we were done writing them because it would be close to the time of year when the Oscars came on.  She took that joke and ran with it and the First Annual Lehman Awards were held.

The day of the awards, we all dressed up.  She had rolled out red butcher paper in the library to make a red carpet and there was a photographer there for the yearbook asking about what we were wearing.  There were hors d'oeuvres, a podium, and a table full of little trophies.

I was for more excited than I showed.  Or at least, I choose to believe I played it cool.

Our teacher presented the first award and that person got up, gave a little speech and presented the next award until everyone in the class had gotten one.  Some of the awards were silly, some were more serious.  Some were things like, "Best Love Story Since Twilight" or "Most Interesting Twist".  We laughed a lot that day at all the silliness.  I sat and listened to everyone else get their awards and laughed and clapped, all the while wondering what she had chosen to give me an award for.

I was the last person to win a category and it was drawing close to the end of class.  I looked around at some point and realized I was the only one who hadn't gotten an award yet and started getting excited.  Mine was definitely not what I expected.

I still have the certificate, and the trophy I got that day is sitting right in front of me right now.  But really, I don't need either to remember what my award was.  For the short story The Inevitable Future of the Avoidable Past, my award was "Winner of the First Annual Lehman Awards".  My pessimistic brain didn't understand this.  My immediate reaction was that there was simply nothing worth picking out of my story.  I assumed that that was the award simply because she couldn't think of anything else to give me.

She gave each of us a book with all of our short stories in it so that we could read each others' and I did so eagerly, hoping to figure out what was so much different about everyone else's that they got real awards and I didn't.  Again, I was surprised.

I preface my next statement with an apology:  I'm sorry to anyone else that might be reading this who had a story in that book.  I am sorry that what I am about to say is going to sound very conceited.  Truly, there were some good stories and some good prose in there.  I simply felt that mine, however, after reading them all as objectively as I could, was on a different level than all the others.  The story was more elegantly crafted, it moved better, the characters were more believable and it wasn't simply a rip-off of something that was already out there.  (Actually, the movie Eagle Eye came really close, but, in my defense, I didn't see that movie until last year.)

That was the first time I remember truly thinking that there might be something special in my writing.  Worlds, creatures, stories and characters had always come naturally to me.  That, however, was the first day that I truly came to respect my own writing abilities.

And so, we come full circle, to the only idea that has ever held any weight with regards to what I want to do when I grow up.

I want to write a novel.

Everyone who knows anything about this will tell you that the best way to learn how to write better is to read, write and accept critiques.  Observe, practice and get coaching.  Most people on the interwebs suggest setting out a particular place and time as your writing time.  A time when everything else is put on hold and you write.  Something.  What you write is supposedly not that important.

I have set a few goals for my writing:

• I will write for an hour every day.
• I will write at least one chapter in my novel every week.
• I will admit to someone if I fail at either of these goals.

The third goal is, for me, possibly the most important.  As the current state of my apartment will tell you, I am TERRIBLE at self-motivation.  I am almost tolerable with keeping stuff at least straightened if someone else will be using the area.  Over the summer, however, I have been living by myself and it has spent most of that time looking as if it had been ransacked.  (I promise I'll have it mostly cleaned up by the time you get home.)

That's where my accountabilibuddy, my sponsor, comes in.  She is going to contact me regularly and make sure that I am writing.  Knowing her, she won't let me off easy if I don't.

I can't promise you that I will write here every day.  I will promise you, however, that in my "Writers Not-So-Anonymous" entries, I will be completely honest about the writing that I am doing.  If you would like to join me on this adventure, you can read along.  I will try to post here a couple of times a week to give some updates.  Try here being the operative word.

You can also join me if you are struggling with the same thing.  If you would like to join Writers Not-So-Anonymous, feel free to leave comments or write your own blogs about it and send them to me.  We can link to each other!

My name is Benjamin and I'm a writer.  It has been 1 day since my last writer's block.
Today I wrote from 9:15pm to 10:15pm.