The Time I Quit Writing #1 – Mid May 2024

April showers, bring May flowers!

Spring is here and I can’t help but think of renewal when it’s this time of year. I’ve also been a little nostalgic and found myself thinking about my early adulthood. I don’t know if I have talked about the first time I quit writing (there were two time and I’ll talk about the 2nd another time). It was when I was in college in the late 90’s. If I’ve told this story before… please forgive me for the repeat. At this point, my blog is over ten years old and I just don’t feel like digging through all the old posts to see if I have mentioned this or not.

Fall of 1997 was the first semester of my junior year. I had my first creative writing class and it was a total disaster. I look back and realize that the professor really hated teaching the class. He would walk in and immediately tell us to “go off and write”. He assigned books we never really discussed and made turning in our assignments optional. I could appreciate the open nature of the class and encouraging students to find their voice… but I also felt like he didn’t want to be bothered with any real responsibilities. It all came to a head when I had a private discussion with him about my work. I’d written some poems I was really proud of and the start of a short story (not speculative).

His reponse? My work was unfocused and I needed to write more about my childhood trauma in order to write anything important. I was crushed. I thought my work was fun and clever. I had a mostly happy childhood and didn’t have much to write about trauma, plus why was pain the only thing worth writing about? I left his office dejected that my work wasn’t good enough and found myself ready to quit.

(Side note: I later learned that a lot of students had complaints about him and his teaching style. Many of my fellow English majors felt he would rather be off writing poetry, than actually teaching a class. Thankfully there were other professors that were wonderful and encouraging.)

I said to myself, “This is too hard. I’m done. I’ll find something else to do besides write.” I left the semester ready to walk away from writing forever. The universe seemed to sense that I would need a break and obliged me. I went thousands of miles away to UNM at Alburquerque for my next semester. Just the break I needed. While I was there, three big moments happened, that to this day, are influential to me as a writer.

The first was something did write about a few years ago. I was in the UNM bookstore and I came across the Borderlands Anthology Volume 1. That collection was so different from anything I had ever read. I devoured it. As I wrote in the other post “This anthology opened me up to a whole new world of authors. Although the first one came out in 1991, I didn’t find it until that day in Albuquerque in 1998. It was the only copy on the shelf and I consider it a blessing that I found it.”

In that post, I touched a little taking another creative writing class. I had already signed up and it would have been a hassle to drop it, so I stayed. It’s a good thing I did. Like I said before, this class was much more rigorous, with more emphasis on craft than my previous class. Even though, I was “not a writer anymore”, I still did the work and found myself looking forward to the class. Here, I had my second moment influential moment.

I had written a short story (literary style) about a young girl that was plus size and needed a formal dress. I turned in the first draft and the professor gave me good feedback. I also workshopped for the first time. I took the advice and rewrote the story, adding a bit more character and cleaning up the plot. But what stuck with me was a note the professor wrote in the margin on the rewrite. She wrote “This just all seems a bit magical.” Whether I could help it or not, this was the beginning of my formulation of my own, true voice. It was already peeping through and didn’t even realize it. (I would see it more clearly a few years later in 2001 when I took another class at the local writing center.) Somewhere, I still have that story with her writing. It’s proof that I was always the writer I am today.

The third big moment came in a literature class I took. The class was an analysis of detective fiction and spy novels. Here we read Agatha Christie, John la Carre, Dashell Hammet, Raymond Chandler, and a few others. One class, the professor held up a copy of Lady in the Lake by Raymond Chandler.

“What kind of book is this?” she asked.

“Detective fiction,” someone replied.

“Good,” she said and smiled. “But there are some who think this is literary fiction too.”

In that moment, I thought to myself, “That’s the kind of writer I want to be.” I wanted to be a hybrid writer, who straddled the line between genre writing and literary writing.

Then I reminded myself that I had quit.

“Well,” I told myself after the class was over. “I’m unquitting!”

Those four months in 1998 are still with me to this day. It was decades ago, and I still carry that inspiration and determination. There have been other hard times in my writing life and I’ll write about those one day too. But for now, the take away is that this was the first time I faced a crisis in my belief about my purpose. I hate to call it a test, but I think of it more like a moment that reinforced my core belief. Those moments are going to come no matter what. But this first time showed me that I could get past doubt. Give myself time, a new environment, and reminders that no one knows myself better than me and what I need as a writer. Holding on to those moments, I could move forward.