Made For
I was a quiet, awkward-ish kid with a big gap in my teeth, a unibrow, and a genuine excitement for writing assignments in school.
Now, I was a good student, but not a particularly dazzling one. Group projects were my nightmare, I could never sleep the night before a math test, and science experiments were just never nearly as cool as the teacher’s excited tone implied they would be (A battery out of a potato you say!? Boy oh boy, I hope they make lab coats in size Fifth Grader!)
But a double-spaced, one-inch margin, 12pt Times New Roman two page essay on MLK, tornados, or the theme of My Ántonia? I loved every part of that. The trips to the library for research (this was the 90s, so I yes, I was probably wearing Doc Martens or Adidas Sambas with my school uniform as I perused the Dewy Decimal system like a casual pro). The satisfaction of writing the notes in my college-ruled spiral Mead Five-star notebooks, even as I wondered why they didn’t come in cuter colors. And most especially, the almost unworldly satisfaction of watching a blank page fill with words. My words.
👆The above love of writing as a kid is usually part of the story I tell when people ask if I always knew I wanted to be come an author.
Yes. Yes, I did always want to become an author, and when I was 28 I quit the corporate world to do exactly that. And I’ll forever be grateful to have spent more than a decade living my dream career. But in hindsight (I’m 42 now, and therefore Wise), I see that that something happened without me realizing it:
In my concentrated pursuit of becoming a published romance author, I somehow narrowed my view of what it meant to be a writer. Even when I broadened my scope to include screenwriting, in my head, being a writer meant creating fictitious stories.
Which might not have been a big deal, had my life gone to plan. I thought I’d be like my icons, Susan Elizabeth Phillips, Nora Roberts, and the late Mary Higgins Clark, writing novels well into my 70s and beyond. And nobody was more miffed than me to wake up at 40ish with the uneasy but unavoidable realization of:
I don’t really feel like doing that anymore—at least not right now.
So I hit pause on being an author.
And so ingrained had this idea become that for me, writing = novels, that I inadvertently hit pause on being a writer as well. I closed the door on that life-long identity because I thought it no longer fit now that I was no longer publishing romance novels every year.
It’s a strange sort of blind spot, considering I read nonfiction almost exclusively, but while I strongly considered (and attempted, and failed) to pivot to another fiction genre, it never occurred to me that I could step away from novels and still be A Writer.
I’d forgotten that girl who delighted in writing the cliché “What I did over summer vacation,” who couldn’t wait to write the book reports that my classmates loathed. Or the college student who pulled an all nighter writing to Simone de Beauvoir and the application of The Second Sex to politics, even though the paper wasn’t due for another week.
And you know what happens when you turn your back on the thing you were born to do, even accidentally? You listen to Billie Eilish’s “What Was I Made For” on repeat while eating string cheese, drinking Chard, and trying not to freak out about what you’re supposed to do for the next several decades.
Who am I if not a writer?
One of my most-used apps is Things. Don’t worry, this is related. So anywa, Things is not only my task manager, but my “catch all” for thoughts and ideas I want capture when I don’t have a notebook nearby.
For example, it’s not unusual to open my Things inbox and find things like “Is time a natural phenomenon or human framework?” sandwiched right in between “buy toilet paper” and “clean out the cheese drawer.”
The other day, a thought kept nagging me, so I opened Things and typed this:
I feel like I have things to say, but I’m afraid to say them.
Then, as I usually do when I’m in the app, I did a quick scan of the rest of the inbox items to see if anything need to be scheduled or deleted.
My eye caught on this, written months ago:
I feel like I have things to say, but I’m afraid to say them.
Verbatim of what I’d just written.
Suddenly, the very thought became very loud. Less a recurring passing thought, and more a calling. And a realization that when I’d put down the pen, so-to-speak, I’d inadvertently been censoring myself. Silencing myself.
I knew that when I typed “I have things to say” was that I really meant was “I have things to write.”
Writing isn’t just something I do, it’s who I am. It’s how I express myself. It’s when I’m most alive. The most me.
Things I’m meant to write. Not just made-up stories, but my stories. Essays. Poems. Papers. Opinions. Articles. Blog posts just like this one. All those things I’m afraid to say, but somehow suspect that I’m meant to be the one to say them. Even just collecting other people’s writing in a commonplace book of sorts.
But I’m rusty.
Enter, The Summer Writing Project.
Every day from June 20th to August 31st, I’ll be writing something. Anything. And posting it here on this blog. (Yes, we’re starting using the start of astronomical summer for the start date, and the end of meteorological summer for the end date. Because today is the first day of “official summer,” and that’s handy, but also, summer is dead to me on September 1st.)
My husband decided to join me in the SWP. (an acronym makes it real)
There are no rules. Not in length or topic. It can be a list of things we ate that day, a book review, a poem, a rant, a personal essay, a deep thought, or a single sentence.
You can subscribe below to get notified of new posts if you want, though you should know I make no promises on what sort of content you’re going to get. They may be only lightly edited, or not at all.
I spent more than twelve years writing 42 novels that I hoped other people would like.
This summer, I write for me.
It’s what I’m made for.
(No, YOU went too deep on the first SWP installment …)
