Of Self-Creation and Writing

I've always thought of myself as a creative person.  Specifically, I've always thought of myself as a writer.  Ever since I was about twelve years old, there was one story in particular that I wanted to tell.  The core of it remained the same as I grew up, though its outlines changed as I matured emotionally and intellectually, and the themes and repercussions of the story became clearer to me.  I started writing the story when I was eighteen, and had a finished novel when I was twenty-nine.  I also had at least six hundred pages of back story, character studies, and other extraneous material which was useful to me as a writer, but not part of the novel.  As some of you know, I found an agent for this novel, which was pitched to six major publishers, but which did not sell in the first round of pitches.  My agent was so discouraged at her failure to sell this book, to which she had a strong emotional attachment and for which she had high hopes, that I withdrew from the agency; being in sales myself, I know that discouragement is the kiss of death, and I didn't want her to try a second round.  I tried a couple of times to find a second agent, which resulted in two partial and one full manuscript request, but no bites.  I started a writers' collective, partly with the idea of workshopping this novel to make it as good as it could be, prior to really trying again to find an agent for it.  At the same time, I started my freelance editing and coaching business.

That was about two years ago, and in the intervening time, it's become quite clear to me that I'm not a writer -- not the way other writers are.  I am not saying this because I want comments telling me that I have talent as a writer.  I know perfectly well that I have an unusually good command of language, and that I have an odd knack for anecdotal storytelling -- and perhaps most particularly, that I have a talent for expressing my emotional life on paper with virtually no ego-filter, which makes it particularly accessible to the reader.  But I am not a creative writer, not like my editing clients are, and not like my fellow-writers'-group writers are.  I'm not haunted by stories that I want to tell.  The one story that haunted me -- I've told it already, and not, in retrospect, particularly well.  That was it.  That was my novel.  There's no more where that came from.

I feel oddly bereft.  I don't know how to define myself creatively.  I used to have no hesitation in saying that I was a writer, but I can't say that now, not honestly.  A writer writes, and I don't, except in this kind of forum, which is a kind of writing, but it's not meaningful (again, please don't contradict me -- this post is not a bid for reassurance).  I remember the strange painful pleasure of being overtaken by the need to tell the story I was driven to tell, and I miss that.  But that was the only story I had, apparently.  Some writers are like that; I'm not the only one.  I miss the passion of my creative life, though.  Sometimes I think I gave it up for my business, which requires a great deal of creative energy . . . I did most of my best writing when I worked a 9-5 clerical job that I was terrible at.  Sometimes I think that I sacrificed my writing on the altar of my mental and emotional health . . . I was most creative when I was dangerously depressed. 

So I wonder whether the tradeoff, if that is indeed what happened, was worth it.  Looking at the life I apparently decided to create, rather than putting that energy into writing, I can't tell.  The payoff is more immediate, certainly; I'm self-supporting,comparatively secure, and reasonably successful.  The delving I used to do into my characters is now put into my own life, trying to figure myself out, and trying to become a functional individual.  But creating my life feels so mechanical, so boring, compared to writing.  I remember how it felt to sit down with the weight of my solid silver Waterman pen nudging my fingers, feeling the tide of something I knew but didn't know sparking the corners of my mind; I remember what it was like to wipe my mind clean and become a neutral channel for something larger than myself.  When I was completely open to the process, I wouldn't remember, afterward, what I had written. 

Inventing my life isn't like that, but maybe it should be . . . maybe I'm missing something about the process.  Or perhaps what I'm doing now with my life is what I did with writing when I was much younger . . . practicing the little things, the mechanics, the parts that are necessary but not much fun.  The difference, of course, is that when I practiced these things as a writer, I knew why I was doing it:  I had a story I needed to tell.  But I'm not sure what the story of my life will be, and so the small practices, which seem so endlessly tedious, aren't giving me much satisfaction.  I want to have the same passion for living that I used to have for writing.  Or if I can't have that, I want the passion for writing to come back.  I want to feel something big again; something akin to the urgency and need I used to have for writing.  I miss that . . . I miss living on the edge.