To Be a Writer or To Merely Write, Is There a Question?

Just recently I got hold of a month old copy of New Yorker magazine and began reading Orhan Pamuk's tale of his father and his father's writing. It has me wondering if there is some precise and extremely relevant definition of exactly what makes one a writer that I have somehow missed all these years, or if each person who writes defines whether they are or are not a writer for themselves. If being a writer entails filling hundreds of notebooks a year with one's musings (I do not) or being willing, or needing to, shut oneself up in a musty, dusty little room in order to compose (allergies), then I am not, by that definition, a writer; yet I write on.

Somewhere within the clutches of either my father or one of my sisters exist the remnants of the women of my family('s?) attempts at written expression. There is a brief story about a "colored" maid's encounter with some bees recorded by my great-grandmother, a poem about her "too long toes" and a (largely fictional, we think) account of my grandmother's travels in Europe following her graduation from college in the early 1920s, and some pieces of writing by my mother that largely explore the trials and tragedies of her own life while growing up on Cape Cod. I have seen all of these, the crumbling original copies and the dutifully made facsimiles, and read them more than once. In my teenage years I had high hopes of adding to the modest collection for my progeny, but cats do not have much patience for such activities and I suspect my niece will be far more interested in her mother's writings and in her own than in the ramblings and mutterings of her (fat) old auntie. But I still write or, to be more exact, type (carpal tunnel surgery) my thoughts and musings into the less ethereal existence of the written word.

I was curious to read that Pamuk took such a long time to open the suitcase his father had given him that was filled with the notebooks full of writing that are such a strong part of this man's heritage as a writer. I have never felt such a hesitation and so do not understand the emotional constraints that might prevent one from exploring the thoughts of a parent, but perhaps that is part of the distance, the infinite difference, between a writer like Pamuk and one such as myself. He is the artist and I the wishful scribbler permanently stuck in her passive voice. He is driven where I am drawn. He is eaten alive by the need to write, while I am intrigued and relieved of emotional burdens during my sessions. He creates and lives in those worlds he delves up from his mind and heart while I write about what I recognize and merely wonder at, which is hardly the stuff of Pulitzer Prize winning tomes.

In my great-grandmother's writings there is only the reflection of her immediate world at the time, in my grandmother's the wondering and contemplation have begun but only insofar as they pertain to the almost immediate in her life. My mother took it all a step forward by going back into her childhood for her material, creating poems (which I think she destroyed before she died - dammit!) and a play that try so hard to create visions of the more beautiful or amusing moments in her life but that still whisper quietly, weaving sinuously throughout the tales of moments of laughter and love, of the deprivations and pain she felt as a child and young adult. But perhaps these are only my own musings, brought forth in response to the musings of a writer one may dare to refer to as "great" in that he has been proven and duly rewarded within his own lifetime.

I took the writings of women who came before me in our family, and have tried over the years to continue it; the establishing of a continuous family tradition, if you will. I have written the tales told to me by my grandmother of her youth and continental adventures as a college graduate, some of them having been decidedly improper. I have written the tales of my mother's childhood and of her final illness and her demise, as well as of the pain and differences between the two of us. I have written of my broken hearted moments and my fears, my joys and my moments of private amusement, and I have tried, rather desperately, to write some of those moments in such a way as to inspire in others the same emotions and laughter, the wonderful laughter, I have shared in, but to no avail - comedy is not my forte'.

There is some evidence, although she is still so young, that my niece may carry on the writing by the women in our family for her generation. I hope so. Perhaps one day one of us will make it into print and cast a rosier glow upon all of the feeble efforts of our predecessors, myself included, which will make our crumbling papers and outdated computer discs into something worthy of exciting the appraisers on a late-21st century episode of "Antiques Roadshow." I wonder what the media for the writers of that time will be - perhaps direct recordings of mind and heart, downloadable for a reasonable fee, into the brains of those who no longer have to take the time to sit down with a book, to scribble compulsively onto paper or into computer files all of their thoughts and feelings, ideas and philosophies; who will never know the joys and excitement to be found in the perusal of the lovingly crafted, written word.