The Writer Under the Stairs

So, I’m a writer. Always have been. Back when I was very young child, I’d play Novelist in the awesome basement of my childhood home (and thanks for that, mom and dad). It’s an easy game: take a literal ream of blank paper and scrawl big loops of nonsense on one side, then fling that page behind you onto the pile of previously destroyed pages. I was a novelist, you see, and that’s how novelists worked. I knew that — I’d seen it in cartoons. I wasted a ton of paper that way. I didn’t produce a novel, though. And I didn’t call myself a writer.

Fast forward a few decades. I’m still a writer. I’ve progressed to using a computer, so I violate fewer dead trees, and my creative process is slightly more thoughtful now — I use words instead of abstract scribbles. But throughout all those years, I rarely described myself as a writer. I instead mentioned what I was doing at the time. Student. Cubicle monkey. Student again. Librarian. Nonprofit sector researcher. Legal researcher. Bookseller. Student again.

But never writer. That title stayed hidden, tucked away under the metaphorical stairs.

Why? Well, for one thing, writers always seemed mysterious to me. I mean, who ever sees a writer at work? They are by nature solitary, misanthropic creatures, toiling alone on their masterpieces, only occasionally surfacing for more food and whiskey. At the end, a book might appear. But the process is hidden.

Furthermore, I felt odd saying I was a writer when it wasn’t what paid my rent. Granted, most writers have another source of income (especially if they like to sleep indoors and eat a few meals a day). But for me to say I was a writer when writing didn’t pay me a dime — well, I felt like a liar.

So while I wrote things, I didn’t identify as a writer. My stories rarely got read by people who weren’t me. I barely understood how the publishing process worked. When I finally began to send out some samples and queries, the indifference of publishers, agents, and magazines was as universal as it was painful. Rejections piled up slowly (response times were slower in the infancy of the digital age). Easily discouraged, I put in fewer submissions. The result was foreordained. How could I be a writer if I had no published works, and therefore no readers?

But I still wrote. Couldn’t stop. Story ideas constantly suggested themselves, whispering in the dark, interrupting my sleep, derailing my leisure reading, sometimes even saving me from boring academic lectures.

Eventually, it occurred to me that I was a writer. Maybe I wasn’t a published author, but I wrote, dammit. That made me a writer. So I tried again. I started telling people that I write. I submitted more work. A few things did get published. And I keep writing.

Today, I’ve made pretty big strides toward making my writer persona public. Now, when people ask me what I do, I say “I’m a writer and editor. You need anything done with words?” When they ask if I’ve published anything, I say “Nothing big yet, but I will be publishing soon.” The decision to try indie publishing is another big factor in this evolution. If I’m going to publish myself, that means I’ll have to promote myself. It goes against my personality, but I’ve finally crawled out from under the stairs into the light...and it burns. But I’m here anyway.

All of this is my long way of saying that I am a writer. Someday, I will be a published writer. I hope to become a writer with readers. And in some wild, glorious, candy-saturated future, I may earn a few hundred bucks a month from my writing. That would be grand.

I don’t expect it to happen quickly. But I intend to keep slogging away. Here on Team Blood, I’ll be sharing that experience, along with any nuts-and-bolts-type knowledge I pick up. Got something to say? Tell me. I’ll write back. Cause I’m a writer.