Some Writer That I Used To Know

I used to be a writer.

I was pretty good at it, too.  I could write the hell out of any topic I had an opinion about and hey, I have opinions about pretty much everything.  I was fast, too - hugely productive.  Page after page, day after day, all of it grammatically impeccable, a lot of it funny or pointed or poignant or capable of moving you or inspiring you or maybe just making your day a little better.

I used to be a writer.  Then I stopped.

I stopped writing here.  And for a while I told myself it was just here that I stopped - I mean, I was still churning out an 800 word nationally syndicated column a week, every week, without fail (and if you think that's easy, you're not a writer.  You're one of those people who say, "I could be a writer."  News flash:  No, you can't.).

And then I stopped writing the column.  In my final column, after 26 years of weekly pontificating, I did a rough word count.  I figured I had written more than a million words.  That surprised even me:

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When I do an approximate count of the number of columns I have churned out in that time, I come up with over 1,300.  At an average of 800 words per column, that’s more than one million words I have sent out into the world.

Really?  One million words?  

Does anyone have that much to say?  More to the point, does anyone have that much to say that is worth listening to?

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I stopped writing a column in July of 2011, but if I'm being truthful, I'd spent the previous three years coasting.  In 26 years I had accumulated well over a thousand columns - it was easy enough to sit down the night before my deadline, call up some random column from ten or twelve years before, re-jig, re-tool, pimp it out, change the references to bring it up to date, and pass it off as new work.  There may have been some new pieces - pick a percentage that will make you happy.  But not nearly enough.

I'd been passing myself off as a writer, and putting out work I wasn't proud of.

Nobody else complained.  From time to time I'd get a note from an editor saying, "This last column has a familiar ring to it ...", but nobody accused me of outright plagiarism.  And I'm not sure one can plagiarize oneself anyway.  People still wrote me letters or emails or stopped me on the street and would say things like, "When I get the paper, your column is the first thing I turn to.  It's my favourite part of the paper."

And when they did, I would throw up in my mouth a little.

I wasn't cheating the papers.  I wasn't failing the readers.

I was cheating myself.  I was failing myself.  I was embarrassed and ashamed.  And I stopped because I couldn't take that feeling any more.

So, I was no longer writing a column.  But that was OK.  I was still writing.  I had a book on the go.  I was just writing different things.

Except I wasn't.  And I refused to admit it to myself.  Until this week.

This week I started to actually bear down and write the book I'd started back in ... God, I don't even remember, 2007?  2008?  And all those things that once came to me so easily, all those parts of "writing" that had been such a joy, just weren't there.

I know why.  The act of writing is like any other exercise: if you don't do it, every day, your muscles atrophy.  But my muscles had atrophied to the point where I began to question my ability to ever write again.  How had they fallen into such disuse?  

It seemed important to me to find out why I stopped writing.  And it seemed that the best place to start was to find out when.

Well, that took about three minutes.

On February 9, 2008, I wrote this piece about the death of my brother Jay. 

A week or so later, I posted a video of some puppies.  Three weeks after, a few pics.  A month after that ... 

The posts were thin on the ground and getting more and more sporadic.  

There were a couple of more bursts - both surrounding my Dad's passing.  But it's clear this was where things came crashing down on me as a writer.

So that's the when.

The why ...?

Here's my theory - and that's all it is.  I am not a psychiatrist or psychologist but this is as close as I can come to why things went off the track:

I once asked my Dad about an Air Force ritual.  When a pilot took it into the ground, there would be a gathering at the Officer's Mess that night.  Drinks would be poured all around, a toast proposed to the fallen comrade, and as each drink was downed, the men would file past the fireplace and dash their glasses into the bricks.

 

It seemed wasteful to me, so I asked my Dad why.  "It's so those glasses can never be used for anything less worthy," he said.

I think, on some level, that's how I felt after spilling out all those words about my brother.  I had words - sure I did.  But I couldn't bring myself to write about anything less worthy.  It just felt ... pointless.

Maybe I'm full of shit.  I've been full of shit before.  But that's what I got.  I'm treating it as an epiphany.

And the thing is - I'm wrong.  Not about the epiphany.  About the pointlessness.

It's not pointless to write words that just amuse or brighten someone's day.  It's not pointless to write about sunshine or grandchildren or sore feet or mice or ... well, anything.

You know what's pointless?  It's pointless to waste a gift.  It's pointless to be able to write and to not allow yourself to.  Because I'm not punishing you.  You've seemed to get along just fine without my words.

I've been punishing me.

So ... time to stop.

Time to start.

Comments

[William]

Nils, you have an incredible gift to give, but a gift unopened by the recipient is just a box with some pretty paper on it.. The recipient of your gift is the audience. no matter who (whom?) it may be. You will never know who the audience might be of the writings you throw out there. New, rehashed, reworked, whatever, there is always an audience. Let them open their gifts. Keep writing

[Catherine Ann]

Your words do matter and they do touch.

"When we look at our lives, or others’ lives, we often focus on what is not there – on what we haven’t achieved. It’s unfair, of course, because life is so designed that all of us fail in so many ways. Even the greatest baseball players who ever lived failed to hit the ball two-thirds of the time. No fisherman walks away having cleaned out the lake.

Instead, let us judge ourselves on the quality of our character; on how much pleasure we can squeeze out of what life has dealt us; and on how much joy we create for the people we love."

[Stoxjox]

thanks for sharing your inspiration to re-dive back in - and looking forward to it!

[Laura]

You just entered a writer's drought, that's all. Death has a way of shutting us down, leaving us to question what is important, or whether certain things even matter in this journey of life. And that feeling is not overtly noticeable all at once; sometimes it just sort of creeps up slowly and drains the life out of us. I would say you just needed time, and after time has passed, the inspiration to impell you to want to write once again. When you find that inspiration, Nils, I have no doubt you'll be able to write the hell out of anything you want to, and don't forget there are those of us who read your old columns about puppies and daughters and find ourselves laughing out loud. You wrote what we were thinking, what we were seeing in our every day and it made us laugh out loud. We could not have said it better ourselves. That was one of my favorite gifts you've shared. ;)

[Rainbow Motel]

Welcome back. I'm still in the game, but the audience is small. If I don't write...I go nuts. I write to keep the voices under control.