Avoiding Destiny, or I'm Not Sure I Made the Right Choices
Prose by Kevin Brown
I often hear writers talk about how they knew they were going to be writers from a young age, often pointing to particular childhood events or mannerisms to reinforce their early calling. At a book festival, for example, Tony Earley talked about how he would narrate his elementary school years in his mind. In third person. As in, “Tony is walking across the playground toward the swing set.” At a conference I attended more than a decade ago, Suzan-Lori Parks talked about sitting under her family’s piano writing novels when she was elementary school age or younger. A recent obituary for Joan Didion points out that she began becoming a writer early, starting her first notebook when she was five. She even admitted in an interview that she walked into the ocean when she was ten, as she was writing a story about a woman who killed herself that way. Even R.L. Stine said in an interview, “I knew when I was nine that I wanted to be a writer. I don't know why it sounded so interesting, but it did.” There are more examples, but those should suffice.
I also wonder if there are authors who didn’t feel that way. If so, I don’t hear their stories, probably because they don’t make for interesting interview responses. If an author is asked about when they knew they wanted to be a writer, responding with something like, “I just stumbled upon it when I was in my early thirties” doesn’t usually make the cut to the final draft of the interview. Writers themselves seem uncomfortable with admitting a late in life approach to writing. Bill Clegg, for example, who published his first novel after close to twenty years of working as a literary agent, responded to the question of how long it took him to admit to himself he was writing a novel by saying, “A long time. If you’d asked me if I was writing a novel, I would have said ‘no.’ I sort of backed into it.” We seem to want our writers to be chosen when they are children, as if they are Old Testament prophets, somebody like Samuel, who receives the call of God in the middle of the night when he is still a boy.
Such an approach has always bothered me for a number of reasons. First, I never like the idea that there is only one path to any outcome. People can decide at any point in life they want to be lawyers or doctors or real estate agents or parents or dog lovers or vegetarians and so forth and so on, no matter what they’ve done or how they’ve been until that point in life. Making those moves might be more difficult at various points in life, but they’re almost never impossible. Behaving as if there’s a single map for becoming something different than that which we once were reinforces the idea that some people aren’t intended to become those people.
Second, and related to that problem, is how we talk about writers specifically, and here we have to blame the Romantics. We behave as if becoming a writer is a calling different from any other non-artistic calling; we treat the other arts in the same way we do writing. The way writers talk about becoming writers, with these childhood stories of anointing, creates the idea that artists aren’t made, they’re born. The Romantics had a similar view of artists, as they used the metaphor of the Aeolian harp, an instrument played when the wind blows through it. These writers were the harp and inspiration would blow through them to create art; that inspiration came from Nature, which was a conduit for the divine. Art comes to and through us, they believed; we are merely vessels.
I also wonder if there are authors who didn’t feel that way. If so, I don’t hear their stories, probably because they don’t make for interesting interview responses. If an author is asked about when they knew they wanted to be a writer, responding with something like, “I just stumbled upon it when I was in my early thirties” doesn’t usually make the cut to the final draft of the interview. Writers themselves seem uncomfortable with admitting a late in life approach to writing. Bill Clegg, for example, who published his first novel after close to twenty years of working as a literary agent, responded to the question of how long it took him to admit to himself he was writing a novel by saying, “A long time. If you’d asked me if I was writing a novel, I would have said ‘no.’ I sort of backed into it.” We seem to want our writers to be chosen when they are children, as if they are Old Testament prophets, somebody like Samuel, who receives the call of God in the middle of the night when he is still a boy.
Such an approach has always bothered me for a number of reasons. First, I never like the idea that there is only one path to any outcome. People can decide at any point in life they want to be lawyers or doctors or real estate agents or parents or dog lovers or vegetarians and so forth and so on, no matter what they’ve done or how they’ve been until that point in life. Making those moves might be more difficult at various points in life, but they’re almost never impossible. Behaving as if there’s a single map for becoming something different than that which we once were reinforces the idea that some people aren’t intended to become those people.
Second, and related to that problem, is how we talk about writers specifically, and here we have to blame the Romantics. We behave as if becoming a writer is a calling different from any other non-artistic calling; we treat the other arts in the same way we do writing. The way writers talk about becoming writers, with these childhood stories of anointing, creates the idea that artists aren’t made, they’re born. The Romantics had a similar view of artists, as they used the metaphor of the Aeolian harp, an instrument played when the wind blows through it. These writers were the harp and inspiration would blow through them to create art; that inspiration came from Nature, which was a conduit for the divine. Art comes to and through us, they believed; we are merely vessels.
The overarching problem is that some people are called to be writers, and some people aren’t. The problem for those of us who didn’t have these childhood experiences of narration or writing, then, is that it’s easy for us to believe we can’t be writers or that we aren’t writers, no matter how much evidence accrues to the contrary. |
The related thought that comes from that approach is that some people are able to be in tune with Nature/the divine, while others aren’t. The overarching problem is that some people are called to be writers, and some people aren’t. The problem for those of us who didn’t have these childhood experiences of narration or writing, then, is that it’s easy for us to believe we can’t be writers or that we aren’t writers, no matter how much evidence accrues to the contrary. I’ll be honest, then; perhaps I’m just bothered by these stories because they don’t match up to my childhood experiences, which then causes me to question how I’m living my life forty or so years after those days when I should have been writing my first novel.
I wasn’t the child under a piano (which we didn’t even own) writing anything. I was the child who was fascinated with sports and grew up in a neighborhood with sports. While other kids, though, were working to get better at those sports, I was keeping statistics. Whenever we went to watch sporting events, we would get a program, so I could track the statistics for that game. Similarly, my friends and I grew up playing a game called All-Star Baseball. Two players would play by creating teams made up of discs with players’ names on them. The discs were divided into fourteen sections. Number one represented a home run, seven and fourteen were singles, while ten was a strikeout. Other numbers represented other types of hits or outs. The player would put the disc into the spinner, then flick it to see the result, moving pegs for players on base or for outs.
My friends and I created leagues or tournaments, but we almost never finished those more elaborate structures. We would play as long as it was raining or cold outside, but when the weather was nicer, they wanted to play actual sports. I, however, would create entire leagues and play teams against each other, keeping elaborate statistics for each player and team. I even calculated defensive averages, such as fielding percentage, even though I had to make up which defensive player made which play, as the game wasn’t designed for that level of detail. I didn’t care which players did well or who won the league; I played for the sake of the statistics. I had pages and pages of those statistics when my league or tournament ended, and I would compile them into year-end statistics, even giving out awards based on them.
Instead of writing poems, I was creating and solving math problems, a trend that continued when I went into high school. During our junior year, every student who was interested in attending college (or leaving campus for part of the day) would go to East Tennessee State University. Various professors were set up in a large room, and we could walk around and talk to them about their majors. I went to the math department where there was a professor working on a geometry problem, which he explained to me. I asked if I could copy it down to work on it, which he agreed to. I worked on that problem whenever I had free time over the next few days, ultimately solving it. My friends encouraged me to go back to ETSU to find him and show him my results, but I always responded that if I solved it in a few days, it must have only taken him hours. I was probably simply worried I was wrong.
That dedication to math, though, was typical of my behavior. I would spend free time lying on the floor of my bedroom doing math problems for extra credit I definitely didn’t need, while my English homework would sit untouched, waiting for the bus ride to school the next day. The only English I enjoyed as a child was diagramming sentences, but that was only because it functioned much like math. There were clear rules, and those rules acted out visually and spatially. I only came to English in college because of a professor who changed the way I saw the world, and I only began writing creatively because I thought that’s what English majors did.
Perhaps my discomfort with the narrative writers tell about knowing they were writers when they were children is really discomfort with the choices I’ve made in my life. If this narrative of childhood calling is in any way indicative of their lives, then perhaps I should have remained in math instead of making the move to English when I did. Perhaps the struggles I’ve had in English and as a writer as an adult come not from the fact that those struggles are perfectly natural and everyone endures them, but from the fact that I was meant for something else. Those narratives remind me that I made a choice, and I may very well have chosen poorly. Or it may simply be one more way my imposter syndrome plays out.
Part of the problem is the dominant narrative about who we become when we’re adults. The stories we hear are from those who knew what they wanted to be when they were children, no matter the profession. We treat childhood as if it’s a clear predictor for what we will become as adults, as parents tell stories about their children concerning the time they nursed the hurt bird back to health (ultimately becoming a veterinarian) or the amount of time they spent on their Commodore 64 computer (becoming a programmer). We go beyond the nature vs. nurture debate past those early years to make childhood the template for the rest of our adult lives. Not surprisingly, such an approach has led to parents who now schedule their children’s lives to the nth degree to assure they’ll get into that college or play that sport professionally or become some profession the family values.
What we don’t hear are the stories about people who deviate from that dominant narrative. Children grow up and become mathematicians or pharmacists or sociologists, and they don’t tell the stories from their childhoods about the stories they wrote in elementary school, as they stopped that practice somewhere in middle school when people told them they were good at math or science or social studies. The same is true for those who grow up to be writers, as they ignore their fourth grade math scores when they were at the top of the class. We behave as if those complicated details never existed, reinforcing the linear story to the one outcome that is neater and easier to convey when meeting new people in our lives. And we pass those stories on to children. In fact, when I tell people I started college as a math major but have spent almost all of my adult life as an English teacher of one sort or another, they have trouble comprehending such a move. At the same time as we’re telling these prophetic narratives, though, we restate the American mythology that children can grow up to be anything they want. Of course, we stop telling children that once they move into the middle and high school years, as we want them to start focusing on what truly matters, which is what they’re going to do once they become an adult. It’s no surprise that teens are cynical of such conversations, as they’re smart enough to see through them but often don’t have the power to deviate from those norms.
I wasn’t the child under a piano (which we didn’t even own) writing anything. I was the child who was fascinated with sports and grew up in a neighborhood with sports. While other kids, though, were working to get better at those sports, I was keeping statistics. Whenever we went to watch sporting events, we would get a program, so I could track the statistics for that game. Similarly, my friends and I grew up playing a game called All-Star Baseball. Two players would play by creating teams made up of discs with players’ names on them. The discs were divided into fourteen sections. Number one represented a home run, seven and fourteen were singles, while ten was a strikeout. Other numbers represented other types of hits or outs. The player would put the disc into the spinner, then flick it to see the result, moving pegs for players on base or for outs.
My friends and I created leagues or tournaments, but we almost never finished those more elaborate structures. We would play as long as it was raining or cold outside, but when the weather was nicer, they wanted to play actual sports. I, however, would create entire leagues and play teams against each other, keeping elaborate statistics for each player and team. I even calculated defensive averages, such as fielding percentage, even though I had to make up which defensive player made which play, as the game wasn’t designed for that level of detail. I didn’t care which players did well or who won the league; I played for the sake of the statistics. I had pages and pages of those statistics when my league or tournament ended, and I would compile them into year-end statistics, even giving out awards based on them.
Instead of writing poems, I was creating and solving math problems, a trend that continued when I went into high school. During our junior year, every student who was interested in attending college (or leaving campus for part of the day) would go to East Tennessee State University. Various professors were set up in a large room, and we could walk around and talk to them about their majors. I went to the math department where there was a professor working on a geometry problem, which he explained to me. I asked if I could copy it down to work on it, which he agreed to. I worked on that problem whenever I had free time over the next few days, ultimately solving it. My friends encouraged me to go back to ETSU to find him and show him my results, but I always responded that if I solved it in a few days, it must have only taken him hours. I was probably simply worried I was wrong.
That dedication to math, though, was typical of my behavior. I would spend free time lying on the floor of my bedroom doing math problems for extra credit I definitely didn’t need, while my English homework would sit untouched, waiting for the bus ride to school the next day. The only English I enjoyed as a child was diagramming sentences, but that was only because it functioned much like math. There were clear rules, and those rules acted out visually and spatially. I only came to English in college because of a professor who changed the way I saw the world, and I only began writing creatively because I thought that’s what English majors did.
Perhaps my discomfort with the narrative writers tell about knowing they were writers when they were children is really discomfort with the choices I’ve made in my life. If this narrative of childhood calling is in any way indicative of their lives, then perhaps I should have remained in math instead of making the move to English when I did. Perhaps the struggles I’ve had in English and as a writer as an adult come not from the fact that those struggles are perfectly natural and everyone endures them, but from the fact that I was meant for something else. Those narratives remind me that I made a choice, and I may very well have chosen poorly. Or it may simply be one more way my imposter syndrome plays out.
Part of the problem is the dominant narrative about who we become when we’re adults. The stories we hear are from those who knew what they wanted to be when they were children, no matter the profession. We treat childhood as if it’s a clear predictor for what we will become as adults, as parents tell stories about their children concerning the time they nursed the hurt bird back to health (ultimately becoming a veterinarian) or the amount of time they spent on their Commodore 64 computer (becoming a programmer). We go beyond the nature vs. nurture debate past those early years to make childhood the template for the rest of our adult lives. Not surprisingly, such an approach has led to parents who now schedule their children’s lives to the nth degree to assure they’ll get into that college or play that sport professionally or become some profession the family values.
What we don’t hear are the stories about people who deviate from that dominant narrative. Children grow up and become mathematicians or pharmacists or sociologists, and they don’t tell the stories from their childhoods about the stories they wrote in elementary school, as they stopped that practice somewhere in middle school when people told them they were good at math or science or social studies. The same is true for those who grow up to be writers, as they ignore their fourth grade math scores when they were at the top of the class. We behave as if those complicated details never existed, reinforcing the linear story to the one outcome that is neater and easier to convey when meeting new people in our lives. And we pass those stories on to children. In fact, when I tell people I started college as a math major but have spent almost all of my adult life as an English teacher of one sort or another, they have trouble comprehending such a move. At the same time as we’re telling these prophetic narratives, though, we restate the American mythology that children can grow up to be anything they want. Of course, we stop telling children that once they move into the middle and high school years, as we want them to start focusing on what truly matters, which is what they’re going to do once they become an adult. It’s no surprise that teens are cynical of such conversations, as they’re smart enough to see through them but often don’t have the power to deviate from those norms.
We need to bury the myth of the artist who is born once and for all, creating new stories in its place. |
As with so many areas of American culture, we need a diversity of stories to tell people about who and what they can become. We need models of writers who grew up writing and reading all of the time, and we need models of writers who stumbled into it in college because of one or two particular classes, and we need models of writers who wrote their first book when they turned seventy and decided to do something they had never done before. We need that for all professions and interests, of course, but we definitely need it for the arts. We need to bury the myth of the artist who is born once and for all, creating new stories in its place. That way, all children and people of any age can believe they, too, can learn to craft literature, no matter what their backgrounds or childhoods.
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About the Writer
Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. You can find out more about him and his work on Twitter and Instagram at @kevinbrownwrite, on Facebook, or his website.
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