writer’s crisis: a self evaluation

Dear Professor,

I’ve been in the midst of a writer’s identity crisis and therefore am having a hard time gauging how far I’ve come this semester. At this moment, I’m anxious about the future and have been questioning if I’m even any good at writing and if I’m even built for it. I may just be coming to terms with the fact that writing is a necessity for me, like drinking water or a good eyelash curler.  But at the same time, I don’t know if it can ever be anything more to me. Like…a career, I mean. I’m proud of the work I did this semester but I will never be satisfied with my work. 

What did you accomplish or learn this semester?

I learned more about my opinion on what creative nonfiction writing does and is meant for, although lately, my stories feel like they have no impact on anything and I’ve been questioning what’s the point of writing all about myself and why should people care. But that’s dark and let’s be positive, Caraline! Okay, I feel like one thing I realized about creative nonfiction is that we want to see a change within the story, within ourselves. We want our characters to overcome or expand and I understand that but sometimes I don’t want to feel change when I’m reading an essay. I read books for change and growth but I read essays to see small events, ideas, and threads, milked and overanalyzed till there’s not a shred of essence left. Overall, I learned I’m picky about what I read and write and sometimes wish I could forgo the rules I’ve spent three years learning. I’m also a firm believer that ignoring rules is necessary but this revelation hasn’t felt like a positive thing.

What do you see as areas of attention for skills you would like to improve?

What I have to improve on is tricky for me to answer at this point because my answer is “everything”. I think I’d like to try writing in a different form because it scares me. Anything other than prose. I’ve gotten too comfortable with prose. Prose and I know too much about each other at this point.

I noticed that I think too much about the reader when I’m writing and I found myself writing things I thought my classmates would like. The reader is in my head the whole time, is that a good or bad thing? I’ve also learned that I want things to be good or bad, not both. That’s too much. I crave classroom validation and feel like a failure unless people look at my writing and say “This is good!” immediately. I also hate failing. Maybe that is why I don’t know if I can be a good writer because I hate to fail. But odds are I’ll be bad at everything if I hate to fail. I feel like a baby on the precipice of work/life, throwing a tantrum because she can’t do things the way she wants to do them. Because there are rules she’s coming to understand and she just wants things to be easier. The thought leaves a sour taste in my mouth. Hopefully, I’ll get used to it but right now I feel like a melodramatic alley cat wailing, listening to the piano from outside a jazz bar. I don’t know how that analogy applies but it feels right. Another thing I’m realizing!: I have a hard time thinking at the core of my writing, I just put down pretty words that I hope will resonate. 

What would you like to accomplish next? What are your short-term goals? What are your long-term goals?

I’ll be taking your advanced nonfiction writing class next semester and probably recycling the same stories I wrote this semester because I think they might have potential. I want to build up to my thesis where I’m thinking I’ll write a collection of essays about my family although I worry I can never publish something like that cause my family will read it. So it’s just an idea. 

Why do you write?

I guess I write because I have no choice. I can’t live with all this noise in my head so it either comes out of my mouth or out of my hand and onto a page. I write because people say it’s what I’m good at. I write because theater and sports were already taken by my siblings and I’m no good at visual arts. My mom says that I don’t choose to write but writing chose me. By her logic, some energy force in the sky was shelling out talents and it came to me, and that thing, that energetic pull, threw my talent back down his throat, rolled it around between his cheeks, and spat it back out at me.