Another One About Being a Writer Without an MFA

 I liked the title, "You can only write at the speed of your own self-awareness." Laurel Braitman on writing loss & self  from Culture Study It will be one that sticks in my head, maybe explains why I keep finding myself not hitting the mark, so I rewrite and rewrite! It may also sidle up to an idea of mine: that our imagination and all that flows from that is limited by our knowledge. That goes beyond writing.

Anyway, I think this might help others wanting to write:

omething I’ve been thinking about a lot is how people who don’t go to school to learn how to write — I’m talking, like, getting their MFAs — actually learn how to write. Some of my style was refined when I took a few creative writing classes in college, but I think I really, truthfully learned to write (and specifically: write about myself) when I started writing letters, to pretty much anyone and everyone, starting somewhere around 5th grade and lasting up until around 2004, when email and phones began to supplant them. How did you learn how to write, and how did you learn how to write about yourself? 

I started writing when I was in first or second grade. Basically as soon as I could hold a pencil and knew how to string a sentence together. I wrote in a series of journals I kept more or less through high school. I also wrote little stories and homemade books and I told anyone who asked me, that I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. I have zero idea where this brazen conviction came from. I’d never met a writer. I just thought it sounded like a cool job you could do and also I’d get to read a lot of books. And then like you, once email and cell phones came around, I stopped and haven’t really kept a journal since. Photos and emails don’t have the same transporting quality handwriting on a page does for me.

Your question about “how I learned to write” makes me laugh. I immediately asked myself “I know how to write?” You’d think writing two books and teaching writing would make me think it’s something I know how to do. But the answer is that I feel, in my deepest core, that I don’t know what I’m doing and it’s mostly guesswork. Maybe this is something to talk to my therapist about lol. But I actually think it’s the feeling of the creative process itself. The “how-am-i-going-to-do-this” feeling is actually the feeling of doing it.

Anyone thinking or writing a memoir should read the whole of the interview.

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