To Be Or Not To Be: The Right To Be a Writer
By Beth Morrow

Central Ohio Fiction Writers'Write from the Heart
September 2004 Vol. XVI, Issue 9 RWA Chapter 48

Last weekend, my son Jason had his friend Evan over to spend the night with us. As I made dinner and they set up for their PlayStation festival in the adjoining family room, I caught snippets of their conversation.

“What do your parents do?” Evan asked Jason.

Jason shrugged as he untangled the power cables with his twelve-year old indifference. “My dad teaches chemistry at the high school.”

I held my breath, wondering why he hadn’t just admitted to Evan that both his parents were teachers, therefore earning from Evan the typical sympathetic response of ‘oh, man, that sucks.’ But instead of further lamenting his fate in life when Evan prompted him about my occupation, Jason flicked on the television and replied, “My mom’s a writer.”

“Cool,” Evan replied before grabbing a controller. Jason popped in a game and they immersed themselves in a college football video game while I stood temporarily speechless, knife stalled mid-chop over a cutting board brimming with salad vegetables.

My breathlessness wasn’t from Jason’s conveniently omitting that the reason he had a PlayStation was because I happened to be an ESL teacher. It wasn’t irritation from his part-truth, or surprise that my name and ‘cool’ were in the same sentence that made me pause over the green peppers--it was the experience, for the first time, of someone other than my writing group friends considering me a writer.

I must admit Jason’s comment went straight to my head. Not that it changed the routine of my writing life—I still awoke at 4:30 the next morning for an intimate session with the characters in my work-in-progress, a few ideas for an article, a little editing on a short story I finished a month ago—but I can’t deny that it didn’t give me a little smile, put a little extra sparkle in my fingers on those keys that next morning.

Writer? Me? How can I be considered a writer if the only things I’ve published is newsletters for my gardening group? How can I be considered a writer when six unpublished novels sit in boxes upstairs in my writing room, a glorified spare bedroom-refuge where I have spent days sifting through story ideas like prospectors sifted through sand for flakes of gold? How can I be considered a writer when my short stories have yet to see the light of day from a glossy page and not my recycled printer paper? How can I be considered a writer without having signed my name to a contract or on a book cover at a bookstore signing? How can I be considered a writer?

Shouldn’t the question instead be, ‘How could I not consider myself a writer?’

After the glow of being coined a writer had dulled by the weather of a few days’ time, I thought back to Jason’s comment. Since I didn’t proclaim myself as a writer every night at the dinner table, he must have picked up the idea elsewhere. And if it were obvious enough for him to mention it to Evan, why hadn’t it been obvious to me?

Some writers have difficulty defining themselves as writers because, to them, what distinguishes the writer from the ordinary human is to have something that necessitates a contract, agent or editor. The supreme danger of this belief is that to deny the writer his identity because he hasn’t yet published is to deny the writer the very existence of his soul. Albert Einstein created formulas for years before he hit on something with the ubiquitous ‘E=mc2’. Before his discovery, do you think he refrained from calling himself a scientist because he hadn’t found a publicly-accepted, undisputable, universal representation that defined energy and mass as different forms of the same thing and that each could be converted to the other? Or, rather, did he don his lab coat daily and study elaborate equations like every other scientist, just one who had yet to make that career-defining discovery? What of Thomas Edison’s numerous failed attempts (rumored in the hundreds) to improve a working model of an invention that would bring the light of day inside homes after sunset? For all of Edison’s successes, there were just as many failures. Imagine Edison at a dinner party being asked by a stranger about his line of work. Should he have dropped his chin, lowered his gaze and mumbled ‘inventor’ in reply?

The writer’s shame should not come from being unpublished; the shame should lie in the inability to admit to others what most matters to the heart and soul of the writer as an individual: the joy of the written word.

Think, too, of the archeologist still hoping to unearth the missing link of human civilization, the researcher who hasn’t yet discovered the cure for diabetes or the professional baseball player whose team has yet to make the World Series. Do these people—or the millions of others on Earth—limit themselves to describing their passions for their line of work in terms of what they’ve accomplished on a grand, elaborate scale? Or do they allow the genuine passion and happiness of their chosen field to shine through? Do they shy away from questions about their work and try to justify their choices with unnecessary babble or do they answer with gusto and excitement?

Writers aren’t writers because they’re published. Writers are writers because they write. Frighteningly simple and elegantly truthful. Of all occupations, writing is one of the most timeless and noble. Being able to take the abstract and form it into the concrete, into something capable of bringing a reader to laughter or tears, to fill the reader with hope or hopelessness, to bring about understanding or revelation through the written word is a talent many wish they had but few possess.

Dare yourself to be a writer. Don’t hide your gift behind mumbles and fumbling stammers—use the power of language to communicate your own wishes, hopes and passions. You were, after all, given the gift of words for a reason. You have every right to be a writer.

(Beth Morrow is a writer who gets ideas by listening to other people's conversations. Though she loves writing romantic fiction, her latest nonfiction article can be found in the Sept/Oct. '04 issue of TWINS magazine.)

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To Be or Not To Be: The Right to Be A Writer
Originally published in Central Ohio Fiction Writers' Write From the Heart, September 2004