How Did You Come to Writing?
This is my story…
Fulfilling destiny can be messy. Life is already this massive workload of learning, screwing up, gaining, losing, and struggle — before you even consider the cost of being what you were born to be.
This isn’t another piece about life being a journey and not a destination, but it is more or less about the pathway to discovering what you really are rather than just settling for the result of being the easiest thing you have access to.
I got an F on the first thing I ever really wrote in school. It was a literary term paper on Mary Shelley, she of Frankenstein fame. It was a six-page stew of bad research, worse mechanical writing skills, and a half-assed attempt at being more interesting as a writer than I wanted my subject to be.
I deserved that F.
At 17, I decided that being a writer was definitely off my list of ambitious goals in life. Oh, I knew that I was going to have to write more academic papers as I moved through college, but I figured school was always going to be an inconvenient checklist of sh*t I had to do, but didn’t necessarily want to do.
I started college at the tender age of 18. I didn’t graduate until I was 35. Yep. It took me almost half my life up to that point to be able to say I was the first college graduate in the history of my family.
Despite my inauspicious beginning as an academic writer in high school, that wasn’t really the reason it took so long. Rather, I actually became a fairly passable writer of research papers and literary critiques as I very slowly progressed through each year of school.
In fact, those papers in college were just about the only thing I did well. I struggled in the other areas of academics, such as showing up for classes and studying for exams.
Oh, I still hated doing them. My professors could tell, too. One of them made a point of calling me out on it.
“Frank, these papers are good enough to get you through this class,” he said. “But they lack any kind of soul. Feeling. Meaning. What is going on with you?”
He went on to tell me that he could see some real, emerging talent in my skills and turns of phrase, but he could tell that I was holding back. I didn’t really have an answer for him — at least, not one that he would want to hear.
The truth? I just didn’t care. I knew I could be good, but I was not motivated in any way to prove that through academic papers.
And that has been a recurring theme in my life: I played one game of soccer in high school, scored with ease, and never played again because it bored me.
The fact is, writing research papers bored me. I’m plenty old enough that this was before Google. The internet was a thing, but just barely. It was more for cat pictures that took two days to download because of dial-up speeds.
Which meant I had to trudge to a deathly-quiet library, dig out old and dusty encyclopedias and other tomes, and more often than not use a — get this — microfiche machine. Hated. That. Crap. All of it.
I made myself two promises as I neared the end of my college journey: I would never take another math class as long as I lived, and as soon as I turned in my final research paper, I would never write anything again that wasn’t my signature endorsing a check.
I celebrated my 13th anniversary of joining the U.S. Army in 2008 by rejoining. I had transitioned out of the Army Reserve the previous year, and my run as a true civilian lasted all of four months.
I learned very quickly that there was just one catch to my rejoining the Army: the job I had before was no longer available. I would have to pick something else.
“We need journalists,” the recruiter said. “That is, provided you can type at least 25 words per minute.”
When he said that, I nearly got up and left. I didn’t have to rejoin — I still had the freedom to just leave and forget the whole thing. And it wasn’t the typing, either. I was (and still am) a very fast and accurate keyboard maniac.
No, it was the writing. Remember those two promises I made to myself at the end of college? This was #2. So I told him that I was pretty disinterested in that particular job.
“There’s a $15,000 signing bonus for it,” he replied. “You get half of it upfront, too.”
My wife was pregnant with our first child at that time, so guess what happened next? Yep.
I was in journalism school for maybe two weeks when I discovered something about myself that I didn’t knew: it wasn’t writing that I hated all those years — it was the hours and hours of tedious research.
It turned out, I loved telling stories. I loved talking to actual people and hearing what made them interesting. What made them tick. I loved learning things from them that completely expanded my thinking.
With their permission, I started telling those stories in writing. The more people I met, the more stories I told. The more stories I told, the more I fell in love with writing.
Which brings me to the here and now.
I have come to believe that as long as I make a point of meeting new and interesting people and really connecting with them, I will never have writer’s block. Everyone has a story, and there are so many people around us that we can’t possibly ever hit the bottom of the storytelling well.
I came to writing by first sucking at it, then just generally hating it, and eventually by gaining the perspective that I was denying my talent for it rather than realizing that it didn’t have to be a soul-crushing chore.
By coming outside of myself and making this art form about the people around me, I opened up my world in ways that I am eternally blessed by.
How did you come to writing? Why do you do it? What do you need to do to truly fall in love with it rather than just hoping it pays next month’s rent?
Let me know in comments, or reach out to me at brotherphrank@gmail.com. I’d love to hear your story!
