Becoming a Writer

by Heidi Stahl

The act of becoming a writer is ongoing; it doesn't occur in one dramatic whoosh. A wedding, as dramatic as it is, is one step in a process of commitment and discovery. Likewise, picking up that first journal, writing the first story, giving a first reading (or second or fifteenth), joining a writing group, getting that first rejection, the first acceptance—all these events mark the deepening of a writer.

One early awakening occurred for me during the first three weeks of my first year at college. My college—a small, private school on the Hudson River in upstate New York—had implemented a three-week writing program for its incoming freshman. Two hundred of us arrived in early August, when the heat and humidity of the river valley were at their height and the huge, hundreds-year-old oaks and elms were still in full leaf. The air was so thick with moisture that we didn't walk through campus; we waded through it. We had the place to ourselves (the upperclassmen wouldn't arrive until after Labor Day) and we spread out luxuriously across the campus in our own rooms, bristling with nervous and hormonal energy, ready to party, to be away from home, and to be college students, whatever that meant.

I didn't think of myself as a writer. A number of high school teachers had acknowledged my way with words, but the accomplishment didn't mean much. It seemed obvious that I should know how to express ideas in writing.

And the praise usually came with criticism, "This paper would have earned an 'A' if you'd handed it in on time," or, "You have a lot to say—too bad this paper is a month late." Writing may have come easily, but the initial act of settling in and committing my ideas to paper terrified me. I had no confidence in myself as a student or a writer.

So the writing program held both familiar and frightening territory. Five and a half days a week (including Saturday mornings) with writing teachers from all over the country, we wrote in groups of about 20. Each week we pursued a different big theme: justice, love, war, and wrote about it from a range of perspectives. We learned to get our thoughts down first, and to let the writing show us what we wanted to say. Sprawled on carpeted floors, perched in deep windowsills, propped up against tree trunks on the rolling lawns, we spent the days writing and reading our work aloud. It was an immersion in thought and language, a literary summer camp.

It helps, if you want to write, to have some affinity for solitude. That August I was recovering from a long bout of mononucleosis, suffering from homesickness, and missing my high school boyfriend. The resulting emotional state made me more willing than usual to spend time alone. It was at night that I discovered myself as a writer. Returning to my room night after night to hone my ideas, flicking on the desk lamp and letting it burn late into the night, I entered the glimmering spell of a writer at work. Hours passed unmarked, the hue and cry of a kegger on the back patio became a distant buzz. Having the space and freedom to grapple with ideas, with words, with arguments, taught me that writing inflamed my spirit in a way that nothing else had. As Virginia Woolf well knew, that solitary room offered both a sanctuary and a playground. It provided a space for me to come into deeper relationship with myself. In all the ways that I defined myself as a young woman, writer was becoming as important and as true as any of them.

Heidi Stahl is a freelance fiction writer and professional editor. She is currently working on a collection of short stories and becoming a writer all the time.