So Am I a Writer, or What?

This morning I again came face to face with the question (which periodically pops up in my mind) of whether I am a writer. Am I a writer? Am I a real writer? What is a real writer? Why do I write? There are people I know who would assure me, Of course you’re a writer! Look, you got a book published! I might rejoin that, as the Great and Powerful Humbug might say, these days that’s a very mediocre accomplishment. One book, one proto-book, and a handful of completed short stories is not an impressive output for forty-five years of effort. Granted, not everyone has got a book published, but anyone can, without a great deal of effort.

Is writing something to which I should ever have devoted any time? Should I rather have dedicated my efforts to, say, literary criticism, or teaching, or art, or cooking, or caregiving, or even cutting hair? Maybe I should have devoted more determination to writing, more persistently, more consistently, more seriously. I notice, with every lazy bone in my body, that my writing efforts only took off when it wasn’t about driving the weary pen and finding paper but making an easily produced (and easily corrected, or even deleted) document on the computer.

There are two people I blame for ever lighting the ambition to be a writer in my brain. The first was my brother Mike. Now he was a real writer, dedicated to the craft, even prizewinning for his work. He buckled down to it and pursued it for most of his life. I was always more nervous and hesitant, and prone to follow the path he had trailblazed. He worked at Gatti’s; I worked at Gatti’s. He went to SWTSU; I went to SWTSU. He wrote, then by golly I had to get in on that, too.

The second was J. R. R. Tolkien, or even more specifically his works. Coming across The Lord of the Rings was such an unexpected experience of beauty. It was like finding the woman you want to marry: you want to wed her and become one flesh, to let her inspiration mold you and her influence somehow put you in more tune with her, to have the resonances she sets up within you blossom forth, and you somehow become more yourself than you have ever been. I would try, in my own clumsy way, to bring forth an offspring of my love. I would write a fantasy.

Well, the years have passed, and I am old and grey. I still write, but is it simply a useless habitual reflex, a momentary diversion? It probably doesn’t matter one way or the other. But sometimes we wonders, my precious, we wonders. And we babble on.