Ask the Writer Guy is a now-and-again feature where I’ll address writing-related questions from other writers, students, or just people who stumble upon the site.

Today’s question comes from Natisha, a student at Aloha High School just outside of Portland.

Q: What made you want to write?

A: The short answer is that I wasn’t too good at anything else. Another way of looking at it is that I was OK at a bunch of things, but seemed to be a “little better” at writing, so followed that current.

The longer truth is that I didn’t have any clue what I wanted to do or be when I was in high school, or in college for that matter. Of course I had a vague idea that it would somehow involve writing, but I had no notion of what that looked like or how that “might work”.

When I enrolled as a college freshman, I tentatively declared journalism as my major, which felt safer than declaring English. I didn’t want to teach and figured if I was an English major I’d wind up either teaching or starving. Two-and-a-half years later, after changing majors a couple of times and finding myself completely lost, I declared English and stuck with it. The turning point came when the head of Penn State’s Journalism Department, who for some reason let me enter his office unannounced at the exact moment I needed to see him, said the following: “They’ll always need people to write VCR instruction manuals.” He also informed me that he’d never taken one journalism class – he’d been an English major.

Going further back to the time when I first discovered I liked to write, I can’t really say with any certainty there was any one thing that made me “want to” write, as opposed to simply “making me write.” What I mean is, when I was 12 or so, these strange little poems began popping into my head from nowhere – mostly they had to do with girls and heartbreak, or else were rather obtuse observations about life in general. I decided to write them down – by writing them, I got them out of my head, which effectively cleared space for new ones to come in (though at the time I didn’t know that was part of it).

I wrote a poem or two every couple of months without taking it too seriously. I shared them with certain friends, all of whom thought the poems were great – when you’re 15 and no one else writes, anything that winds up on paper is great.

Over time I discovered that writing was a way to work through a lot of teenage/high school anxiety, anger, fear, etc. Some of my friends at this time were either into punching things or carving stuff into their arms with razors in order to cope with breakups and hormonal imbalances; I chose to write, which seemed less violent and possibly more rewarding.

Another thing that happened was that, toward the end of high school, I hit a wall with math. I was good up until Algebra II, then completely lost all comprehension. At the same time, we started doing more writing exercises in English classes. Up until then, English had been reading-intensive and, in a word, boring, at least for me. I wasn’t a reader, nor did I come from a reading family.

(My mother would probably argue with this, and has every right to, since she was always reading something – what I should say is that I was never encouraged to read on my own.)

By my junior and senior years, with math becoming harder and English becoming more interesting, plus with the poems that were already coming out of me, I simply followed the path of least resistance – writing.

Thanks for your question, Natisha.

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