Why I Almost Gave Up on Writing

I started writing when I was twelve. I started with short stories. The first one was about a dog named Josh. I am sure I still have it somewhere. I might even have brought it with me to Europe. Apparently, I do have a sentimental side.

I wrote consistently, aggressively for almost a decade after I found writing.

When I was supposed to be paying attention in class, I was writing.

When I was decided not to go to class, I would willingly go to detention, which I spent writing—until I almost got suspended because I had too many detentions.

           I considered the idea because that would have meant more time for writing.

When I would get home from school, I would sit down in front of the never-ending marathons of Law and Order SVU and write. The days I wasn’t writing, I was walking around my city thinking about writing.

Writing consumed me. When I went away to college, I did the same thing. I spent my free time writing or creating my characters in The Sims and playing out their world.

I eventually gave up on the Sims because it took too much time away from committing my stories to paper.

I moved to several cities, changed friends, had no friends—none of it mattered because I had my characters and different worlds I could jump into at any moment.

I remember one day when I was twenty, I was writing a book—yes, ambitious—about characters in their early to late twenties. I had a character who would often sit alone in bars while waiting for clandestine meetings with someone else. I would describe the scene as realistically as I could. It occurred to me that I had no idea how it felt to sit alone in a bar. I had no idea how her bourbon tasted. I had illegally, of course, tasted vodka, tequila, wine, beer, and rum, but I had never tasted whiskey. I did not have any whiskey drinkers around me.

The character told me she drank bourbon, but I had no idea why, what she looked for, or what would even be a good bourbon for her to drink that would impress the older male character she was meeting. I didn’t understand what it meant for her to not care what he thought.

I did not understand the world I was writing this character into. I did not understand her, her motivations, or her experiences. I spent most of my life up until that point in fictional worlds. I hadn’t lived. Not that drinking, let alone drinking alone in bars, is a prerequisite for living. But in general, I spent my life reading, writing, watching TV, or walking. I hardly left my house, and when I did, I was still in my imagined worlds.

This was the first flag that something was wrong with my writing process. 

I took two courses at UC, Santa Barbara on dystopian fiction: Life at the End of the World and Imagined Futures. I forget which came first. I think imagined futures. I had read Animal Farm, Brave New World, 1984, Fahrenheit 451, and at least part of We in high school. I had seen War of the Worlds, and I was consumed by The Walking Dead.

I was not prepared for how much I would love dystopian fiction. The imagination of where human behavior, ambition, and attitudes towards others could take us fascinated me. This was also the answer to my question. I read The Crucible and understood its connection to McCarthyism in the US. I knew that that was a form of dystopia in America. I knew I did not have to live an imagined future scenario to write one. I just needed to connect it to something I did know about, and I did. I switched from my literary, stream-of-consciousness book to dystopian and continued writing for another year and a half.

I wrote with a passion and a confidence I no longer recognize. I wrote a screenplay at fourteen, a book at sixteen, and by 19 or 20, I was writing an additional four books. These were all terribly written, but the concepts got pretty good. But I shared them, submitted them for competitions, and bragged about them. I was fearless and unconcerned with what other people thought of my writing. I knew I was going to reach my goal of publishing by the time I was twenty-three.

Then I was raped, and I stopped writing.

I didn’t realize it at the time. I found other things to do with my time. I told myself I was living. I had friends for the first time in a while. We would go out to dinner, get drinks, or go see a movie multiple nights a week. I was hardly ever home. I would be out every night for a week living.

I write to explore my thoughts and feelings about the world. Every writer puts part of themselves into each piece of their work. Some are better than others at disguising themselves in their work, but we are always in there. I stopped writing because I was unable to process what had happened to me. Writing meant being honest with myself.

It was the man who raped me who pointed it out. He listed off everything that was wrong with me:

• I had no hobbies.
• I had no interests.
• I laughed at low-brow humor.
• I didn’t read intellectual books or any books for that matter.
• I stopped writing.

1. Fuck him.
2. He was right.

But gee, I wonder why.

I stopped writing because I could not admit to myself what he did to me, that I was, once again, a victim, and that I had no idea what to do. It took me weeks, months, years to identify the different ways he hurt and changed me. Here we are, nine years later, and I am still trying to get back to being comfortable writing.

What happened to me made me feel powerless, like I was nothing, like my voice did not matter, like I did not matter. Why write? If I was nothing if my voice didn’t matter, who would read anything I wrote? If I didn’t matter, who would care?

As much as that and what he did hurt me, I was as disgusted by how much I let him and what he did affect me.

I stopped writing for what would become four years. Strangely enough, it was only future tragedies that would get me to start again—even if just briefly.

Several years later, after I had plenty of first-hand experience drinking whiskey alone in bars, I would be violently attacked again, strangely, it was in a way that same female character—the bourbon drinker—was attacked in the first draft of that book. I learned what that felt like, which I could have lived without. There was a point where I was convinced this (another) person would kill me. Several months later, a good friend of mine died. One of the last in-depth conversations we had was about our dreams and how each of us wanted to write a book. His death, the recent reminder of my own mortality pushed me to get back into writing and pursuing my dream.

I set my sights on an MFA program.

I needed structure: both for my writing and my life.

I started writing a short story that I would use for my entry. I planned out most of the story: the characters, the plot points, the backstory, and how it would all unfold. I wrote draft after draft of the beginning, while I researched different programs, deadlines, and housing costs in the different cities. I was all in.

But I never joined a program. I moved across the country to get out of Santa Barbara and planned to work for a year before applying to BUs MFA program. But applying meant getting letters of recommendation, and to do that, I would have to show someone my writing. To show someone my writing, I would have to actually write something. I still wasn’t ready to do that because I was still sorting through my own turmoil. I wasn’t prepared to take on that of someone else—even if that person was a fictional character I had complete control over.

Weirdly, the control over someone else, even fictional, or even my own life that I often strived for no longer appealed to me. I wanted, for the first time in my life, to just be.

So I did.

I didn’t write anymore. I worked the job I had brought across the country with me for a while. I took Igneous to dog parks, continued rock climbing, and spent time with family. I just existed and let myself start to heal.