caveat: I’m not a guy. Nor am I trying to be sexist by using the term “one of the guys.” I’m using a term from our culture than indicates a casual sense of belonging. And that’s all. –CMSS
How big was the town you grew up in? I come from third-world Iowa, a town of (then 703) people. And frankly, I was the weird kid. Weird for lots of reasons. Rest assured, this isn’t an essay about my family dysfunction or my backwardness. What this is about is my writing. You knew it would be.
If you come from a small town, and you are mildly talented, I think your talent may well be blown out of proportion. I was bright, but I thought I was a genius because we didn’t have a lot of bright hanging around in third-world Iowa. I was multi-talented, but, depending on the day, I thought I was a diva, an Academy award winner, or even Dostoyevsky. There are people in the world that have more talent than me. I’m willing to concede that now. Even in writing.
My ego was bolstered by a lot of fake A’s from high school English teachers who were happy anyone would write in abundance at all, grammatically or otherwise. Luckily, my high school started sending me to the local community college once a week. I was bored and there was no TAG in rural Iowa then. There I met George, who taught me that red marks on my stories were a valuable thing.
But this isn’t about my mentor George. God bless George, but no. It’s about the fact that deep down, I think many writers believe that our writing is special and unique. This may be peculiar to me, because I was bought up in the small town of Ignorant Conceit (which is on the map in Iowa, really).
The young part of me always believed that I had special literary genius to share with the world. I know, I know. I know what you’re thinking. You’re the writer than has special literary genius to share with the world. You win. I’m not going to arm wrestle you for divine status or anything.
Happily, college cured me of the majority of believing in my divine fate, by allowing me to meet wonderful, interesting, and smart people. I’ve seen brilliant people among my students and my co-workers. I have even known people who were (gasp!) smarter than myself! How cool is that?
I believe, now, that I can co-exist with other writers, who may also be special literary genii (TM). The good news is that I’m not bad as far as writing goes. I’ll get to Carnegie Hall most likely, especially if I keep practicing. I can hang out with the cool kids.
I want to be published. I would like it if my talent will get me published, but I strongly suspect that it will ultimately be my hard work and persistence that gets me in. In some ways, I’m gonna miss being Dostoyevsky, and I’m gonna miss the belief in my specialness. But go it must.
Every writer has something to say, differently than another writer, in a different turn of phrase, or with a different word found by leafing through the thesaurus at random. That’s what makes us unique, but that we all do the same things, more or less, that’s what makes us one of the guys. Believe it or not, the things that all writers do is what gets us published, regardless of individual variation.
Writing is about writing, not just the recognition of your genius. Writing is the whole job. Not just about those moments when you shine and autograph, but also about rejections and writers block, revision, and being a little hungover at a convention. It’s about uncertainty, racing toward deadlines, worrying about sales numbers, putting another rejection in your file, lots and lots and lots of tasks that are part of word smithing. And actually, it’s about sitting down in front of your computer, making your fingers dance up and down on the keys several, several times, not pretending that the world will be dazzled by your prose when you finally get around to jumping the keys.
After all this time, because I’m writing and sending out queries, getting my rejections, and making my word count, I’m finally one of the guys. I’ve come a long way from nurturing, but not sharing, my divine genius. Remember how I used to go to college when I was sixteen? I guess that means I had some talent, sure, but in the end, the only way to do this is to write, to get to know people, to market wisely, and to write some more.
Because you can’t tell the prodigies from the regular guys at the end of the day. We don’t get a distinctive tattoo or nothin’. The person with the most rejection letters wins.
Catherine
