How I Became A Writer

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It was probably fated. My grandmother taught me to print early on, when I was about four. My guess is that she found it a good way to occupy me and stop the endless stream of questions with which I pestered just about anyone in range. She taught me the alphabet, gave me a stack of freshly sharpened pencils and some ruled school exercise books, and set me loose on the world of letters. She kept the distinctly untidy results for years. To judge from the contents of the exercise books, I was drawn to written recordkeeping from the beginning, as they’re full of mundane and fortunately brief notations: saw a robin; went for ice cream; got a new puzzle, etc. Really fascinating stuff, but practice of a sort nonetheless.

When I started to school, by now a dab hand at composition, albeit of the simplistic sort, I never minded the writing assignments and could pop off those 100- and even 500-word themes without breaking a sweat. When well-meaning adults would give me journals or diaries at Christmas, I would assiduously fill them in until they disappeared into the maw of books and other necessities that filled my room. Essay-writing contests were a reliable source of pocket money throughout grade school and into high school; essays won scholarship money; and writing extra-credit papers saved me from professors angry at my habit of cutting classes to the limit allowed by institutional regulations. I edited school papers all the way through various educational levels from grade school onward into college.

The extra writing all this involved was no effort, as I was obsessed – as I had been since I was four – with the act of putting words on paper. I wrote during school hours. I wrote at home. I wrote on the bus, riding to my part-time job. I wrote every spare second I wasn’t doing something else. All this activity wasn’t from any overdeveloped sense of conscientiousness. Rather, I couldn’t help myself. If I ever found myself somewhere without a pad and pen, I would get antsy and wonder what I’d do if an idea turned up that had to be recorded. I was so anal-retentive about always being ready to write that I would even find myself surreptitiously checking out whether or not others present might have writing media on their persons that I could borrow.

One thing I didn’t do was take writing courses. Writing was so effortless, literally like brushing my teeth. I had a tendency to overcomplicate most things, and I was afraid that classes would lead to the danger of doing that to the one truly uncomplicated part of life. Writing was also the most reliable thing in my life. It was inevitable that, after grad school, I would become part of a profession that is built on communication and that involves a lot of writing, probably also inevitable that I would ultimately turn to book-length work.

So, I guess, in a nutshell, I became a writer because I couldn’t help myself. It’s what I do. It’s what I’ve always done.