Thinking You Should Not Write?

 I gave up writing once, long ago, because I thought there was nothing for me to say. This disappointed several people. I did not know how much I had disappointed myself until I started writing again. I started my journal during my pretrial period. The journal began as my apologies to friends and friends only to become a tool to examine myself and then to become a record of where time and thought have taken me.

I knew from Albert Camus of creativity as counter to nihilism. Wrapped up in my craziness, I forgot that lesson. I will not do so again. No longer do I feel self-destructive. I want anyone reading this to know they are meant to be creative, that being human means being creative. We suffer when we do not create.

I did write because I thought there was nothing to do after William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. I had to destroy myself, have friends point me back to writing, and go to a prison in New Jersey before finding out I did have stories worth telling.  I do not suggest this as a career path.

I do suggest you read more widely, to travel. You have your stories to tell and so get to work.

Reading Francine Prose on Her Encounters with the Literary Strange inspired the preceding paragraphs. She wrote the following (along with examples, which I am excluding):

Some of our most exciting and memorable reading experiences occur when we discover a story or novel, essay, play or poem that seems to us so original, so unexpected, so apparently unaware of—or unconcerned by—past models, conventions and clichés, and yet so steadily faithful to a guiding principle all its own that, regardless of how much else we may have read, we think: This is something new. I didn’t know that a writer could do that. 

***

  I never meant to stage a literary freak , parading deranged writers in front of my horrified students.   I did say that few writers on our list could have functioned in the culture that, today, sees literature as a profession for which you prepare like any other: going to the right school, meeting the right people. The right internships, finding the right agent, orchestrating a career just as in law or finance, though writing may seem more glamorous though the average wage per hour is substantially lower. I reminded my students that writing is a calling and not a job, a vocation and not a business, a compulsion and not a hobby. It has to be worth the time and trouble, the work, the obsessive commitment to helping that plant to grow in the corner of the self, the plant that survives for centuries and still seems beautiful—and strange.

Consider now Indigenous Horror Authors Tap into Tribal Traditions. They have found their stories; they are not stifling their imagination.

Read this excerpt of SOMEBODY LOVES YOU by Mona Ardji - which is billed as a hybrid novel. The writer did not bind herself to a form but found a form for her story.

 I see now it would have been better to indulge the compulsion. I suggest anyone feeling the urge to write to do so. Let not the compulsion be repressed.

sch