Lying to Myself

I am an author.

The aforementioned statement isn’t exactly true… yet. Though I have been a writer for most of my life, I have mostly written for myself. I enjoy telling stories, imagining fictitious people and places and situations. I am also driven to write, motivated by a phantom muse who whispers in my ear, “What if…” I was born to be this thing I am now trying so hard to be.

The stories and characters I write about are largely born in my own mind, but always inspired by someone I’ve met. Every story I write contains pieces of me and my experiences in life. But for the most part, the stories are just there in my head, waiting to be found. Sometimes, finding them is easy, and sometimes not. But they seem to just exist in me.

That’s not to say the actual writing of the stories, the thinking and the physical act of creating something one can print and read, isn’t work. It is an awful lot of work. It takes a whole lot of some things I don’t always have on hand. like perseverance, follow-through, executive function. I have attention deficit disorder, the kind that makes me inattentive, easily bored, that kind of thing. In other words, I lack that ability to see long-tern projects through. So, I have a portfolio of projects that are unfinished in one way or another. I’ve written many short stories but done nothing with them beyond a first draft. I have many sets of notes on stories I’ve thought up but never bothered to try to get “down on paper,” as they say. And to be honest, I have in the past usually quit somewhere around the halfway mark with every novel I have started. There are more than six of those, and they are all viable writing. Viable, but unfinished. Failed.

In a way, almost all the work I’ve done so far as a writer has been a failure. I don’t say this in a negative way; to me, failure is absolutely a part of life, and something we must grow comfortable with if we are to avoid crushing depression and self-condemnation. To say they are failures is freeing in a way. I can take responsibility for my inaction and choose how to proceed. So far, I have published only a few newspaper article submissions (one I am particularly proud of, though, because I interviewed, photographed, and submitted the story and the newspaper in my small Oregon town published it in its entirety, unedited). I have never entered any sort of writing contest. I have submitted a query only once in seeking an agent. I never checked my email to see if there was interest. Maybe there’s a letter of interest somewhere out there in the ether, one I’ll never read because I’ve forgotten the email address I was using at the time. I just don’t know.

Yet, I call myself an author.

I’ll tell you why I am choosing to call myself the thing I am technically not, exactly, yet. It’s quite simple and yet maybe a bit profound, too: I’ve decided to be the thing I was born to be, and I’m quite comfortable with the discomfort I feel in giving myself a title, as I am my own boss now. I am calling myself an author before I’ve actually achieved even a sliver of the pinnacle of a writer’s success, which to me is publishing a novel. I have had to go out on a limb and label myself as if I’ve beenbeen doing this writing thing wholesale.

I decided to become a full-time writer around a year ago. There was something about turning forty-eight that did it for me. My older brother, who was my best friend in this world, had passed away several years before, just shy of his forty-ninth birthday. The thought that I would soon overtake him in age was galvanizing. My father was dying of cancer. He was interested in my writing, and the thought that I owed him some negligible evidence of success motivated me. And my husband offered me the ultimate gift of time. Time to write without the worry of a work schedule, or the exhaustion of having a job to go to. I took those things and started running with them.

I got started by lying. Yep, me. Yep, lying. I first told myself a fictitious tale wherein I was an author. Then I told it to others. I went about creating an office for myself, the place where I would perpetrate this crime as often as it took to become reality for me. I went and made myself a social media presence. I invested in myself financially, too, big fibber that I am, by purchasing a domain in my name and making myself a website, complete with dedicated email, furthering the fallacy. I announced to the world that I was going to do this thing. You know how once you’ve told people you’re going to do something, you have no choice but to do it? I said it, and now I will need to live it out until it is true.

Once I said it, I had to start writing in earnest. Though I have many unfinished stories in my files, I wanted to do something fresh. In November of 2022, I started a brand-new novel for NaNoWriMo, which is National Novel Writing Month. The gist of being a NaNoWriMo participant is to challenge one’s self to write an entire novel (more precisely novella, as the goal is 50k words) in the month of November. An entire rough draft. In one month.

I did not finish in a month. I am okay with that, because what I wrote is very good! I am almost at the halfway mark on the new story, which means I am about 1/3 of the way through an actual novel, which I have given the working title, “North.” I already know the actual title, but I like to keep those to myself, thank you very much!

Something happened the other day that made me feel, for the very first time, like I am getting close to telling the truth. I was talking to my daughter on the phone, and she mentioned a co-worker of hers had told her that she was writing a children’s book, and wanted to know if maybe my grandkids would be interested in reading her book, so she could get some feedback. My daughter told her, and get this, because she doesn’t often say nice things about me to me… my daughter told her that her mom is a writer, a novelist in fact, and she was sure we would all be happy to test out her story. I just about fell out of my chair! in that moment, I was smiling as wide as wide can be, and I swear I grew an inch.

It’s when someone else calls you the very thing you are working so hard to convince yourself you already are that it starts coming together. A tiny bit of that “impostor syndrome” all of us would-be literary sensations are afflicted with flakes off and blows away in the wind. We sit a little taller. Type a little faster. Post our progress on social media. Try to connect with other writers in a community. Get our old work out, because we suddenly are certain we will finish everything, find an agent who is excited as hell about us and our work, and secure a contract to write three more of those beauties post-haste!

I hope people realize how much I appreciate their kind words and encouragements. They are truly instrumental in helping me to stay as delusional as possible, for as long as possible… hopefully, right up through the publishing of my novels.

Maybe everyone who ever became something they dreamed of started out as a liar. I mean, fiction itself is made up, untrue. There is a whole lot of literature out there, though, that tells us we must speak life into the world we want to exist. I believe that is true, especially for those of us who are called to make the stories people so very much enjoy. There are schools of thought that say you must train your brain to do the things you need to do in order to make yourself into who you want to be. Kind of a “habits making reality” philosophy. I believe this follows the speaking of dreams. So, I’ll keep telling myself I am an author, and I’ll keep doing the things an author does, until I finally become this thing in every sense of the word.

I am an author.