This Elusive Craft
Goodness, we’ve swept past Halloween and are pushing toward Thanksgiving. Time! Where does it go?
I’ve been flitting up and down the east coast presenting sessions at various NCTM state and regional conferences, receiving accolades by insisting that, even during math class, “If we’re going to introduce children to a book, we have the responsibility to make certain it’s a good book.” YES!
Now I’m preparing for the NCTE national conference in Philadelphia. Great expectations, as I make dinner plans with author and publisher friends, but also intimidating. This conference will be a collection of English scholars, authors, publishers: not a familiar world for me, and not a comfortable world.
My publications extend far into the past, beyond any horizon I can still see in the rearview mirror of the onrushing vehicle of my varied professional life. Software manuals; too many magazine articles to count accurately; poetry anthologies; children’s picture books: the credits are there. Nontheless, when someone asks, casually, across a dinner table, “What do you do?” I feel awkward saying, “I’m a writer.” I’m a writer? Am I?
I’m a mathematician, a lover of pattern and order and number. In my first career, I designed software systems, large data bases. Ask me then what I did and I’d bore you to tears with the answer. It’s easy to explain creating a data table in base 2 or hex, searching it for a pattern, looking for a hidden answer.
But I don’t do that now. Somewhere in my varied past, I morphed into — a writer?
I write, so that must have happened.
Still, my work is unusual. No thought provoking YA novels, no lyrical poetry. I write about the visual beauty and tactile sensuousness of architectural stone; and I write about the elegance and simplicity of number, about the seminal ideas of mathematics. These are my passions and my subjects. I write about them because I care about them, and, too, because after years of work, I know them, understand them, want to share them with others.
I write.
But am I a writer? When will it become comfortable to answer yes to that question? When do you know you’re a writer and that you’re good at what you do? Ever? Are we ever content with this craft — we writers?
November 9th, 2009 at 10:10 pm
I would like to know the answer to your question too, Marianne! I keep hoping that some day I won’t feel like an impostor anymore…
Although, btw, none of us here have any doubts that YOU are a writer!
November 13th, 2009 at 12:33 pm
How amazing to know someone who has a “fascination with pattern, order, and number”! These areas do not draw me in at all, so seeing into your mind was a gift to me. I should be creating characters as different to the core as you and me. Thanks for sharing so enerously!
I am fiercely, thoroughly a writer now, but it took years to feel that way. Having multiple titles helped. So did presentations as “the writer.” Making many deadlines, (bleary-eyed and triumphant) handling final edits under copyeditors, writing bios and flap copies, and having real friendships with my editors finally overwhelmed my insecurity.
You, Marianne, perfectly convey your passion and understanding through words. That is what most writers can only hope to do!
Kay
December 11th, 2009 at 1:45 pm
We are writers when we use words to express life and love through story. Everyone is a writer.