So You Want to be a Writer?

At the end of my first quarter as an English Major at UC Davis, I've found myself considering where I am as a writer, versus where I want to be in the future. What does it mean to be a writer? Why is it that I want this so badly, yet I can't seem to go anywhere with it?

I recall that I have been writing in some form or another for my entire life. In middle school I used to make up stories with friends. In early high school, I started telling my own stories, usually in some way related to my life, the things I wanted, and the past - things I had felt I lost and wanted to regain in some form or another. At the time it was a sentimental thing - personal, private and in no way something to share with anyone else. It was simply a way to exorcise those teenage demons that we are all cursed with.

Later in high school, I stopped storytelling in fictional form, and my desire to write instead settled into letters to my camp friends and counselors. I remember sitting and writing pages and pages of letters to these people, cataloging in some form or another all that was going on in my life at the time. Dozens of pages a month to a handful of people who probably learned a great deal more about what was going on in my mind than anyone really needed to know. But regardless of how it was released from my pen, it was writing.

I stopped writing letters in college, and started writing fanfiction. A story that didn't belong to me captured my mind and I couldn't get it out of my head. For 3 or 4 years it continued as I wrote literally hundreds of pages of fanfiction, before getting distracted by my life and my friends.

Since then, I've never quite gotten back to writing as I should.

I've often tried to find ways to kick start my writerly brain again. I've attempted to start a number of original works. I tried going back to fanfiction in a different fandom. I started a livejournal with the intent to actually use it as a blog, but somehow instead turned it into a silly way of cataloguing my life in an utterly non-writerly way. I took a creative writing class, and found myself doing the required assignments and nothing more.

Now I am officially an English major, working towards a degree with an emphasis in creative writing, and sometimes I find myself wondering why? I want it - I want it desperately, but I am completely out-of-tune with that side of my brain. I'm terrified to go into my degree program's creative writing classes for fear of using them as a tool to get a degree rather than a tool for my own personal growth and expansion. I want to make those classes mean something. And I am afraid that I won't be able to do it because I have already lost something that I may never regain.

I have approximately three and a half months before the spring quarter begins at Davis. I intend to take my first writing class towards my major at that time. Before I do so, I want to make an effort to regain my writerly roots. I have a goal to make some progress on my original fiction, and if that's not working for me, then I have this new blog. A serious blog. It is here for me to utilize as a tool to get myself to write again. I intend to update it weekly, with either a post such as this - a thought provoking look at a subject, or maybe even a writing exercise. Maybe a short story. Whatever feels right at that time.

I've named it the Literary Darkroom, as it is a studio for the writerly side of my brain. I find that darkrooms are places where I not only feel creative, but succeed in being artistically productive. After all, sometimes it isn't until I dip the print into the chemicals, right as the image is beginning to take shape, that I understand exactly what it is that I am looking for.