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| Amelia, Andrea's cat. Yes, she has demons - she's a cat! |
“Friday’d give me time, Saturday could wait, but Sunday’d be
too late…”
– “Seven
Days,” Sting
“I’ll do it later” – every teenager, everywhere, has said this at least once. Spoiler: they
never do.
I shouldn’t throw stones, for me, it’s the height of
hypocrisy, because I am a terrible procrastinator. It’s a curse. Partly ADHD –
self-diagnosed, but before you scoff, try having a conversation with me.
What else inspires my procrastination? Fear of failure
maybe? Hard to be sure.
I was visiting family when we found ourselves watching
their still-kittenish cat rolling around on the floor, apparently playing with
air. My friend studied the cat for a moment before asking (with a laconic air I’d
dearly love to emulate), “Do you have demons?”
Well, yes, obviously for the cat – all cats do.
And yes, me, too. I have demons. Well, one demon.
No, I am not schizophrenic.
My demon is my narrator. Think The Wonder
Years: grown-up Kevin Arnold calmly explaining to the audience what was
really going on while his younger self blundered enthusiastically through life.
Unlike Kevin, however, I'm a fifty-something,
grown-ass-looking adult still faking my way through life while my internal narrator
placidly comments on whichever ridiculous rabbit hole has most recently caught my
attention.
I’m just a girl with an iPhone, a perpetually open
Notes app, and a narrator who seems convinced the bathtub is the ideal place to
workshop an essay. Yes, it’s a bizarre premise, but don’t knock it. There are
still people who think gummy bears and Frank’s RedHot can’t be a wonderful
combination. How is a sensory deprivation bathtub writing space any stranger?
I have a bone-deep faith in the Wizard of Oz business
model – hide behind a curtain and fake it! Or perhaps it’s simply this: if it
looks like a writer, acts like a writer, and sounds like a writer… then, egad,
it must be a writer.
For years, I comforted myself by insisting I simply
wasn’t a writer. Other than an admiring English teacher or two – about as
objective as your mother telling you you’re pretty – the concept of
being a writer belonged to other people. My friends with agents, journal
publications, and six fantasy novels – or is it seven? The closest I’d ever
come was a three-year stint as a book blogger.
Ask me how pissed I am that it wasn’t my blog that
gave Ice Planet Barbarians its big break, but some BookToker’s!
Four years after I’d read Ice Planet Barbarian and raved about it.
Ugh.
Not to worry. Here’s my next step toward World
Domination: I shall conquer BookTok, bend it toward nonfiction, essays, to be
specific.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. (Another good way to
procrastinate.) Six months ago, my self-image was best described as … murky. I
was the last one to know writing was my path. Even my internal narrator hadn’t caught
on. She just kept talking about stuff. I was like one of those people you read
about who show up with a complete tiny human being and earnestly tell people
they had no idea they were pregnant.
Perhaps I assumed everyone had internal commentary on
their life, the universe and everything going on inside their skull. It never
occurred to me that writing any of it down might become a vocation. My entry
into writing was more akin to a harassed mother finally exclaiming, "Fine,
we'll go to the park NOW!"
So, I began writing without much of a destination,
simply following the white rabbit – or, in this case, my demon.
When I shared this disturbing development with a
friend, her advice was refreshingly straightforward: “You should take a
course.”
Not just any course. Brian Henry’s “Writing Personal
Stories” happened to be starting a new session just a couple of weeks later. I
wasn’t entirely sold on what I assumed was the memoir aspect.
Memoirs are things people like Greta Thunberg write, not
hockey moms in the middle of an existential crisis.
My pieces were certainly personal. I just wasn't
convinced they were stories.
None of my bathtub recollections could reasonably be
considered memoir any more than a conversation that begins, “This reminds me of
this one time at band camp…” before abruptly veering into, “Did you know
dolphins and whales are both cetaceans – and closely related to hippopotamuses?”
Regardless, I decided professional help was in order.
One of our first exercises was to draw our childhood home, street, or
neighbourhood. Brian is a delightfully flexible instructor.
We were then asked to write something inspired by it.
I wrote a confessional about the death of a
neighbourhood pet.
We were witnesses, not future serial killers. Rest
easy.
But it still amazes me that a rudimentary – not even
remotely to scale – floor plan of my childhood home somehow unearthed the
memory of a blistering summer day straight out of Cujo, complete
with second-guessing ourselves over the fate of a stray cat that had somehow
gone from being the neighbourhood’s pet to mine. And then died.
At the end of class, Brian outlined our homework. I’ve
since dubbed it the Choose Your Own Adventure approach to
creative writing.
Option one: continue the piece we’d started.
Option two: write about something else we’d discussed
in class.
And if neither of those appealed?
Write whatever we wanted. Just write.
Week after week, I did.
I wrote.
I started a Substack. I researched; I read and
researched some more. All the while, I kept writing.
The essays wandered drunkenly from The Three
Little Pigs as an analogy for birth order to a rumination on why
Prince Harry gets on my last nerve, from hockey fandom as a meditation on
business practices to… well… octopuses.
Lots of octopuses. And crows.
Looking back, none of this should have surprised me.
Even in my twenties, I imagined my life revolving
around books. Publishing. Editing. Marketing. Eventually, book blogging. I
seemed determined to find every job adjacent to writing while avoiding the
uncomfortable business of becoming a writer.
Perhaps it was lack of confidence. Or much more likely
procrastination dressed up as practicality. They can look remarkably similar
from the inside.
Somewhere along the way, I stopped focusing on what a
writer was and simply wrote.
These days, whenever someone tells me they’d love to
write someday, I hear echoes of my former self: “I’d love to write, but …
“I don’t have enough time.”
“I need another course.”
“I should read a few more books first.”
“I’m waiting until I feel like a writer.”
I understand the instinct to avoid, to procrastinate; I
spent decades perfecting it. But apparently, all those hippies and yogi types
were onto something:
Sometimes the doing comes first.
Being catches up.
“Later” has an uncanny habit of becoming “never.”
Andrea Whittle is a writer and market analyst with a longstanding habit of looking for
patterns and asking why things work the way they do. After spending much of her
career finding patterns in data, she now finds them everywhere – which is
either useful for an essayist or a terrible way to get anything else done.
Her creative nonfiction combines personal narrative,
cultural observation, and whatever has most recently sent her down a rabbit
hole. Previous subjects have included hockey, fairy tales, Prince Harry,
octopuses, crows, and the occasional existential crisis.
Andrea previously published "Do you have demons" on The
Intellectual Peacock, her weekly Substack about culture, behaviour, books, media, and the wonderfully
strange business of paying attention.
See more pieces about or inspired by Brian’s retreats, workshops and classes here (and
scroll down).
For
more essays, short stories, and poetry by you fellow writers see here (and scroll down).
See
Brian’s upcoming weekly writing classes (including a “Writing
Personal Stories” class), afternoon workshops, and wonderful writing
retreats here.
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