Writerly Instincts

A Personal Exploration of the Origins of the Impulse

Are writers born or made? Or is it a combination of nature and nurture that drives a writer’s obsession with the written word? For me, it seemed to be there from the beginning, though it took some time and maturity for me to recognize it as more than a mere affection for stories. In time, I would develop a special relationship with the language of storytelling, but like many writers, I read a lot and I dreamed a lot before I ever picked up the pen.

Infancy

My earliest memories of stories are those in the songs my mother would sing. When I was too young even to know what a “dog in the window” referred to, I imagined a sad pup looking out from a dark and lonely house. “How much?” my mother sang, but without an understanding of sales or pet shops, I imagined that “How much?” referred to just how much the dog could endure in its current state of sadness. By the end of the song, I would picture the dog finding its way out, usually pushing its way through the unlocked window to a sunlit yard beyond. As with other songs my mother sang, “The doggie in the window” became a story that I embellished with further details the more I heard it, creating a longstanding narrative in my mind to accompany the words and melodies.

Later, when my mother read books to me, I became fascinated with the rhythm of the telling, how during every reading she paused at the same points in the story and spent more time on some pages than others. How the story was told, I realized at a very young age, was as important as the pictures. But it wasn’t until I learned how to read myself that I learned just how important each and every word could be.

School Age

Learning to read was more than a mere milestone in my young life. It was transilient, leading me on journeys far beyond what the television offered, which is saying a lot considering how restless my imagination was at the time. Not only that, but over time it gave me a capacity for new types of experiences, understanding, and ultimately, expression.

The early reading years were full of wonder and what ifs, taking me to places I would never have imagined otherwise. The picture books soon progressed to words alone, making every word count and allowing me to imagine the stories however I liked. I fell in love with the narrative voices that went on and on in their own particular way, spreading the story like a map across my thoughts to be filled in and adjusted however I wished.

It was during this time, in the later years of grade school, that I began to create stories in my mind without ever writing them in words. I had done this for as long as I could remember, but at this point the stories became less fluid and more written in my thoughts as complete creations. For days at a time I imagined these stories unfolding from one scene to another, going so far as to add my own imagined voice-over narration to explain the finer points of the plotlines. I hadn’t yet made the connection between the stories in my head and the concept of writing them in words, but that moment, it seemed, was near.

Adolescence

In early adolescence, I was still approaching my writing assignments for school as if they were no different than any other assignment in any other subject. My grades were less than promising, and I spent most of my time gazing from classroom windows as I daydreamed through the hours.

One experience, more than anything else, led me to write on my own. It was my first girlfriend, a very free spirit of a woman who showed me that poetry — making art out of words — was more than a rarefied endeavor of academic elites. It was accessible to anyone, she showed me, and it was her own collection of poems, typed and printed and bound in a pamphlet stitch, that made the case. Her words were delicate in tone but strong in impact, full of lines that seemed like stanzas of their own, taking me immediately into a darker, more beautiful, and much lonelier world than I was accustomed to at that age.

It wasn’t long after reading my friend’s poems (several times over) that I made my own attempt at composition. By this time we were drifting apart, and that, of course, was the subject of my first piece. Like countless teens before me, I wrote sad, unpunctuated lines full of mixed metaphors, but it sounded like poetry, and it was my own creation, my own endeavor. And perhaps more importantly, I felt better after I had written it. There were cathartic moments that followed the words, as if I had released myself into the ink and onto the page.

Not long after my first attempt at writing a poem, I wrote another, and another. Soon I was adding some of the elements from my invented stories and daydreams into the poems to give them a more epic feel. There were no poetry classes in my high school, but I routinely visited the school library and read samples from nearly every book in its tiny section of poetry anthologies, tucked in a far corner where no one else seemed to browse.

When the time came for a new writing assignment in my English class, I added some of the poetic language I had been playing with, giving it figurative nuances and broken grammatical rules for impact (something I learned from my readings). Not only did the teacher give me a perfect grade, but he wrote the words, this is a keeper, an excellent and honest paper. It was the first time I had enjoyed a written homework assignment, and the first time I had received an A on an essay. The subject, as I recall, was the growth of cities, but it could have been about anything.

Adulthood

I took poetry classes in college, which went relatively well, but I also wrote my first short story. It was a long (probably too long) and dreamlike tale of a boy with supernatural abilities, a subject that is commonplace today but slightly less common at the time, when stories of crime and immorality were closer to the norm. I was late getting my first story in, but I made it to the dropbox just before the deadline. The following day, when I entered the classroom for creative fiction writing, the instructor was already standing in front of the room and reading my story out loud to the class. For a young introvert, it may have been one of the most exciting experiences of my lifetime thus far. And when the instructor asked me back in at the end of class for extremely kind words of praise, I devoured every moment of it.

As my college years passed, I would eventually seek publication in print journals and online media, ending up with a regular job at one of the university newspapers as an editor and regular contributor, but those initial experiences in English and writing courses gave me the confidence to do all of that and more. Without those instructors, I would have continued writing, but I never would have considered it as a career.

Middle Age and Beyond

I have no idea how my writing journey ends, but this is how it began. With a graduate degree in writing and publishing, I went on to work as a freelancer for numerous publications, websites, blogs, and advertisers, but without the encouragement I received, I would have likely written privately as a hobby for years to come. To answer my own question, writers are born, and then they are made, but I have yet to meet one who was unmade.