Bitch of the Week: A Little Self Bitching

Contributor: Paralith

This isn't as angry an entry as my last Bitch of the Week, but I think this still kind of fits. What I'm bitching about today is myself.

Speak Coffee wrote in her writing blog about our days in high school when she, City Girl, and I would all write stories and share them with each other every day as we wrote. Speak Coffee is the only one of us who has continued to follow writing seriously.

For a long time, I wanted to follow writing seriously too. For a while, I also thought I might want to pursue art seriously too. In fact, I chose the colleges I would apply to based on the variety of options they offered - art, writing, and science.

My efforts at art had started to die long before I went to college. My last semester of high school, I spent one period as an assistant to the art teacher I'd had for two previous classes. She told me she'd be happy to help me develop some pieces for a portfolio during that semester, if I wanted to apply to art school at some point in the future. But I wasted that whole semester, and made no efforts to make any pieces, even as I watched several of my friends do exactly that (including Speak Coffee, if I remember correctly!) When I went to college, I made a few attempts to enroll in a class or two at the art school, but it was difficult enough where I gave up after a year.

I'm not sure what exactly was going through my mind at that time; I had always enjoyed art, ever since I was little, and when I applied myself, I could be pretty good. The only thing I can blame, really, is laziness. Simply not enough motivation.

I held on to writing a little tighter. I declared myself a double major in English and Biology, largely to ensure that I could apply to my school's advanced senior year writing program at the end of my junior year. I took two creative writing classes, and took care to screen my potential teachers to that I would be able to write science fiction and fantasy stories. I had discovered that my large university's writing program largely frowned upon "genre fiction," a term I had never heard prior to that point. It was something I railed against with relish, and claimed that I would show them all with my writing that genre fiction could stand up with traditional fiction.

But for the whole year between my last creative writing class and the application deadline for the writing program, I did not revise and complete my primary piece as I had planned. I said I would, but I didn't. The deadline came and went, and I did nothing.

I really did love writing - I loved my stories that I wrote. And the piece I had planned to apply to the program with had been well received by my classmates - many of them specifically told me that they didn't usually like fantasy, but they liked my story. One of them called my dorm room that night she first read my story to tell me how much she liked it. What more encouragement could I have asked for? But somehow, day by day, I let time go by without working on my story like I should have. Clearly, I didn't love writing enough. I dropped my English major and went for straight biology.

Even after graduating from college, during my Lost Year, my boyfriend tried to encourage me to spend my ample free time (while I was "working" on getting a job) working on that story again. He talked about finding a literary agent to help me out. He tried to help me work out some serious world-building issues I had with the story. But again, I continued to let days go by in which I didn't work on it - I watched TV, played video games, surfed the internet. Needless to say, my boyfriend was pretty disappointed in me.

Looking back on this sordid history is one of the things that helped jar me out of the worst part of my Lost Year. I was and am still ashamed of myself and my laziness, and my seeming inability to do what's good for myself. I did the same thing during my Lost Year when it came to getting a job, taking the GRE, applying to grad school. I realized I was letting my whole life go down the toilet, and that I had to change.

I hope, one day, to go back to that story, or to writing in general. I've managed to get my motivation in science, now I just have to work that into the rest of my life. It hasn't been easy, but I'm trying.