I was skimming an article on Backspace–The Writer’s Place a website for writers with delusions of being published. The article was an excerpt taken from the book, Lessons from a Lifetime of Writing by David Morrell. In it Morrell discusses his experiences with the wanna-be authors he encounters in writing workshops. He always begins these seminars by asking the students why they want to be writers, and he always gets the same teacher’s pet responses. The kind of answers that seem so obviously right that they are wrong on every level you can think of as a writer.

“I want to be a writer to satisfy my creative nature.”

Uh-huh.

Why not paint or sculpt or throw pots or dance or sing or decoupage Hallmark cards on styrofoam balls to give out as Christmas gifts? 

“I want to make a lot of money.”

Valid enough because Morrell has made his share. David Morrell is the creator of Rambo. He wrote the novel, First Blood, that is the second most famous of Sylvester Stallone’s franchises. He was also my American Literature instructor one fall semester while I was attending The University of Iowa. This was before the movie came out and I don’t think more than a handful of students in class knew that Morrell was a writer or had even heard of his book. I thought that the guy was a fair lecturer, and the fact that he was a published author with a book about to be turned into a Hollywood movie explained why I kept getting stuck with his graduate student correcting my papers and tests. She was notorious for being a hard-ass, and we all prayed fervently for our papers to end up in the tiny pile that Morrell actually graded himself. The only thing I learned from him was about reading, not writing. He had us read The Last of the Mohicans. I read it and afterwards couldn’t come up with one reason why such a piece of racist, misogynistic crap was a classic. I could’ve kissed the man for his first comments to us as a class about this book. He said, “Last of the Mohican is one of the worst books ever written, and if James Fennimore Cooper hadn’t had the good fortune to be one of the first American writers to make it big in Europe, we wouldn’t be reading it today.” You might be asking yourself what I learned, exactly, from such a blasphemous statement. Well, I learned that “classic” is not synonymous with “sacred” or “well-written” or even “readable”, and that was  a hugely important thing to know for an English major and future teacher. It freed me from preconceptions which in turn allowed me to one day liberate my students to think and decide for themselves.

Morrell believes that writers write because they have to, and I agree with that. Real writers write. It’s a compulsion. As much as I love you, my audience, I would write this blog without you. My vacation last week was a somewhat maddening exercise in finding things to do to fill the time I would have spent writing, and finding myself frustrated by the plethora of ideas that swirled around in my brain in the absence of this outlet. Everything I read was fodder for an idea. Every time I got near my computer, I was tempted to “jot a few things down”. It reminded me of my younger days when I could lose myself in a spiral notebook, churning out page after page. So what happened to that girl and those days, Mr Morrell might ask me if I were a student in one of his workshops. Nothing happened. Literally. I quit. Gave up on the idea of writing because a few people thought I wasn’t that good, and others questioned the sanity and sense of writing for a doubtful living as opposed to the certain living I could make teaching. And I wasn’t strong enough or sure enough of myself to ignore them. It’s still my Achilles heel. Even when I know I am right, I still wonder if the majority rules. It does, of course, but that doesn’t make me wrong about what I should do, have done or be doing.

There is that cliche about doing what you love, and the money will follow. I don’t think that it is necessarily true if you are depending on that money to pay the bills or put you in an enviable financial situation. Rob and I joke about me needing to hurry up and write that best seller, so he can retire, and we can build that little house in the mountains sooner rather than later on when we both may be to old to clamber around those peaks. Truthfully though, if money were an incentive to write, why then when I needed the money a lot more a while back wasn’t I moved to put finger-pads to keyboard? Where was my compulsion then?

What happened to awaken my need again wasn’t a lightning strike as much as a slow burn and once it caught fire was not controllable. I can’t imagine a scenario now that doesn’t include writing.  Teaching still occupies that fallback in my mind but I can’t see myself happy doing that again. I brought the idea of teaching up with Rob just recently and he likened a fallback career to a crutch that helps a person avoid their true passion. He’s right. Like Morrell is right when he tells his students that writers write because they can’t help themselves.