It was an indirect journey. I’d decided that I was a writer when I was sixteen, after spontaneously generating a pretty bad poem that I thought was pretty good. I was in the twelfth grade at the time, without a living- writer role model in sight. I did not have the foggiest notion of how to go about being a writer, though it was clear to me that I would need a day job, at least at first, since even such an optimistic person as myself could not expect to burst into best-sellerdom at once. Our generation did do some writing in school, but it was in the form of essays, or else grammar and composition. We were not encouraged to write fiction and poetry, although we did read a lot of these. Should we be overtaken by the Muse, we could always publish the results in the school yearbook, if we had no shame. After taking a couple of false turns- luckily, only in my elected to go to university after all. (I had, briefly and madly, decided I would support myself by writing True Romance stories. This seemed easy enough, as they were all basically some variation of Wuthering Heights, in which the girl wrongly falls for the guy with the motorcycle instead of the one with the steady job at the shoe store. But I found I couldn’t do this: as with any kind of writing, you somehow have to believe in it yourself or it isn’t convincing.) Then I had a short period of thinking I might become a journalist. But a second cousin who was in fact a journalist- he’d been dredged up by my parents in order to discourage me about the newspaper life and herd me in the direction of higher education- told me that women journalists only ever wrote the ladies’ pages and the obituaries, and my- by then- snobby and bohemian self cringed in horror.
Posted on: Wed, 05 Jun 2013 10:51:39 +0000
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