The Writer that is no Writer

My storytelling, ladies and gentlemen

I want to be a writer.

Let me rephrase that: technically I am a writer in that I do this blog thing regularly while currently working on a book, but as I’ve mentioned before, I’m relatively new to Writing. I’ve been thinking lately about what has kept me writing throughout my life, from UIL meets to graduate school, to dabbling in fiction. I write because I’m a shitty storyteller.

A good storyteller “spins yarns” as they say, weaving a tapestry of prose with every syllable they utter, every pause, every breath. Their stories grab your hand and whisk you through the jokes and the heartache and the memories. A good storyteller knows how to grab you and take you to the end. You become a willing captive to a narrative that you know will most likely have a beginning, middle, and end.

On the other hand, if I try to tell you a story the timeline will become a jumbled mess, I’ll rush past important bits of information, and I’ll even give you a non-ending because I can never be comfortable with just stopping the story. I worry that somehow I might forget some bit of information or that something will remain unclear, so I just ramble on until I eventually run out of steam. When I tell a story, my brain becomes a ten-car pileup where time has seemingly stopped, nobody knows what to do or where they are, and you’re waiting for someone to come and rescue you. Every time I’m expected to speak, my anxiety voice says, “maybe you should write this down so that it’ll make sense,” except that’s never helped either. The embodied nature of public speaking combined with the focus on me and only me creates an impenetrable fog in my brain where I can kind of see parts of my story so I just have to try and connect the dots as best as I can.

Time is the only thing that helps me with story. Time for my brain to slowly collect the bits of information that are needed to create the building blocks of story. The synapses need time to figure out what happened, how and when and by writing my way through those things, I can get to the why.

I have a love/hate relationship with my brain: on the one hand, it took me from Texas, to the Midwest, to the Pacific Northwest and gives me the sort of brain-dead confidence to say, “well why can’t I do x? Why not me?”. On the other hand, I’ve lived my 40 years with horrible self-image issues, a guilt so deeply ingrained it practically fits me like a tailored suit. And, of course, my brain runs at the speed of a Ford Festiva, puttering along like a go-cart on the freeway.

But I want to tell stories. I have ideas. I want to write them down and I’ve been writing them down. Regularly. Working on a longer story that I can get lost in. Writing characters who make me laugh. My brain is comfortable in this space because it can just dwell in the realm of narrative. There’s nobody waiting for me to speak up. Nobody wanting me to hurry and get to the point. I can take my time and make sure the words make sense and the characters feel real. I want to tell the type of stories I like to read, where people have smarter and quicker comebacks than I ever will or where they can be fitter, handsomer, uglier, chonkier, funnier, drier than me. I want to write characters I could sit down and have a beer with or get into fights with. But most of all, I want people to understand and connect with the story, following along with every word, every sentence, every paragraph, and every chapter. I want them to be proud that they’ve finished or mad that there’s not another book in the series yet. I want to see my name on the binding of a book (hopefully multiple books). I write stories because I want them to outlive me, to prove that I was here and say, “at the very least, this he believed in.”