New New Year’s Resolution

My New Year’s Resolution was the same thing it is every year: write more.

Why? I love it. I’ve always loved it. As a kid I would write up stories, poems, jokes. I’d put words on a page and get anyone with eyes to read it. If they couldn’t read (small animals or young children, for example) I’d read it to them.

The best part about writing is that whatever you put on the page is law. You can bend a certain reality to your will. That’s powerful stuff. That’s a kind of agency that is intoxicating to an adult, let alone a kid who’s just learning how to put words together for the first time.

I’m 23 and I don’t write as much anymore. I wish I did, but I don’t.

It’s excruciating and embarrassing. Mostly because I call myself a writer. You ever hear of such a thing? A writer who doesn’t write.

I remember a few years ago I told my parents I wanted to be a writer. My dad sent me an endearing comic with the message, “this reminded me that writers write.”

He’s right. They do. But I don’t.

I mean, I do. Little stories about my Dungeons and Dragons characters. Fanfiction. Messy blog posts about video games and nostalgia and how they contribute to a higher understanding of who I am.

I got a good fifth of the way through NaNoWriMo last year before life complications tore into my schedule. (And really, whose idea was it to write novels in NOVEMBER?) When I tried to go back to it, I just couldn’t.

You hear about good writers all the time. You know the type. Writing isn’t a profession for them, it’s a compulsion. If they take their pen off the page their heart might stop.

I know that’s not real. I know that, like everything, writing takes time and discipline and practice and experience. I know that real writers aren’t supernatural beings. They get the creative urge, same as me, but there’s one serious difference between us. They do the work. What it really takes isn’t just desire, but discipline. An ability to sit down and do the work.

I’m a hard worker. I always have been. Why can’t I do the work?

My surface level laundry list of excuses is made up of the usual suspects: I don’t have the time, I’m lazy, I don’t really feel like working on a single one of the unmanageable number of ideas I have.

Anyone who’s ever accomplished anything will tell you my list is bullshit. If you want to do something, you make the time for it. I make the time to cook, to code, to play games and do theater. I honestly love writing more than I love doing any of those things. But if I love it so much, why can’t I just go and do it?

A couple of days before the end of 2017, I decided to do some field research. I made some time to suffer through writer’s block.

I sat down at a computer, opened up to a blank word processor, and stared.

Then I pulled out a draft of something I had already started. I read it over and over, made some corrections, got to the unfinished part, and stared.

Then, thinking I just needed a change of scenery, I took out a notebook- two, twenty, every one in my house!- and flipped to an empty page and stared.

Every time my fingers would twitch, take their first steps to putting words on the page, I could hear a sinister voice in the back of my head:

This thought isn’t original or useful.

Nobody’s going to want to read that.

Someone already said that, and they did it better than you’re going to.

It’s not a small voice. It’s imposing. Domineering. Deafening. And, I mean, it does have a point.

Half the reason I’ve been writing is for other people. That may not be true for other writers, but it is for me. I love attention. I love to share. It’s a little selfish, but I like to frame it like this: when somebody reads what I’ve written, I’ve established a connection with them. Maybe it’s as simple as them smiling or understanding my situation. Maybe I write something that really resonates with them.

And if I can’t write something worth reading, I get to thinking that maybe it’s because I have nothing to say.

So far, the best thing I’ve written is a Pokemon fanfiction. I say it’s the best thing not only because it’s my most popular, but also because I’m really proud of it. It’s five thousand words from the perspective of my favorite character. It only took me several hours. There are some moments that come from nowhere. There are some moments of pure brilliance that I knew no one would get but I put them in anyway.

I had people find me privately and tell me how the piece, and my larger work inspired by this game, has affected them. That, honestly, is the best complement I’ve gotten on my writing, and it’s about Pokemon.

And I’ll be honest. I didn’t write that story for them. I wrote it for me. I wrote it because I felt like I had to. Telling that story was an important part of making sense of my own story. And that, probably, is the lesson I was supposed to take from it.

At least I hope that’s the lesson, because I’m taking it and running. I’m changing my New Year’s Resolution.

I have a lot to say! Look at my Twitter account. I don’t shut up! My fear is that people won’t find what I have to say is worth it.

But fuck em.

Not everything I do or say is going to seem heartfelt or raw or groundbreaking. Not every word I put on the page will be golden. Actually, it’s going to be mostly crap. People probably won’t read it. And if they do, they probably won’t like it.

But fuck em.

That’s my New New Year’s Resolution.

If I’m going to be selfish about writing, I might as well go all the way. The whole point of writing, the part that I used to love as a six to sixteen year old before I grew up and the Internet and English teachers told me writing had to say a certain thing or go a certain way, is that you can put whatever the hell you want on the page. And I’m going to.

I’m going to write a lot of garbage Pokemon fanfiction, and I can’t stop me.

I’m going to write a lot of scrappy, self-indulgent blog posts about my life.

I’m going to write stories. I’m going to take all of my rage and sorrow and joy and depression and love and hate and hope and anxiety and desperation and I’m going to find a way to drip all of it onto the page and spread it around like I’m Jackson Pollock until I get something that I like.

That I like.