They all said it would be hard. I didn’t believe them.

I’ve been a reader and a writer all my life. I don’t remember my grandmother teaching me the alphabet, though I do remember loving the swooping, grown-up lines as I practiced cursive. Later, I read and reread books while walking up and down staircases. I filled up notebooks with plotless stories about overlooked but impossibly captivating maidens who ultimately won the princes’ hearts. Stories and words were so ingrained that the thought of studying them never really crossed my mind–it took me two years at two different colleges to figure out that I should probably be an English major. That was a good choice.

But now, it’s been a very long time since I’ve done any writing. Months. “Writing” not counting any of the copy I draft at work, or the introspective blah I scribble in my journal most nights. Rather, “writing” being the half of a novel I banged out a year ago while in an artists’ small group. Or the scene that’s been hanging out by itself in a Word document for months, typed confusedly into existence because of a conversation I overheard. Or an essay for that contest I didn’t enter any of the last four or five years; or a revisiting of my thesis from Professor Felch’s senior seminar, which I’ve wanted to do since I turned it in; or even the sloppy poems in the unruled notebook I carry around.

The pace I set myself for the small group burned me out, sure; but I could, theoretically, make time to write more manageably. The idea of shepherding comes to mind: shepherding my brain, shepherding the words. I want to write. I am sad about not writing. So . . . ? There’s an inability to complete Step One, butt in chair. One possible explanation: I don’t want it enough to actually do it. But that thought almost makes me sadder.

Last weekend, I spent much of a five-day visit with a very good friend (and former co-worker) musing about books and literature and ideas. It was beautiful and stimulating. This friend is a writer, as in she just sold her first novel and has made writing her full-time job. I envy this. But I do not crank out a novel at nights after I go home from my day job, which is what she did for her two years in New York. For the most part, I enjoy the things that fill my days: people I love and meaningful work and coffee and wine and books and wandering. But I am also missing things, and they niggle at me. Why have this urge to write if I don’t have the gumption? (I’d like to say the time, though I feel somebody will tell me that’s a cop-out.)

My writer friend and I frequently lament that there are too many books. Too many books! How are you supposed to read all the ones you want to? The two obvious solutions, duh, are: 1. to  be sad constantly about the ones you aren’t reading even as you read others, or 2. to feel hampered by the impossibility of it and read nothing at all.

My larger-scale lament perhaps is: too much life! There are so many things I want. But which are the ones I want enough to actually do? Is writing one of them? Will I choose to make it one of them?

Choice. Ah.

Those professors who warned us how hard it was to keep up post-college writing when no one is making you do it, possibly they made it quite clear that it was a choice. Even a responsibility. I am hard-headed in many ways–one of them being when I think I already know something, it is quite hard to convince me otherwise–and so it’s three years later that I am finally banging my head up against this concept. Sigh.

The thing is ownership. The thing is no longer being able to live with the consequences of not choosing. I try to stem the flooding with cracked hands, but I never took up whatever implements you use to halt water. Sandbags. I don’t know what those are, obviously. But now I think there must be value in utilizing things you don’t really understand. How else are you supposed to learn how they work?

Maybe the question isn’t why can’t I make myself write? Maybe the question is what matters enough? And also, why?

There must be a third solution, and I suspect it’s somewhere this way.

Amy (Allen) Frieson

After graduating with an English degree, Amy (Allen) Frieson (’10) moved to New York City and spent several exhilarating years working in children’s book publishing. Now, she works as a career consultant and has much more time for writing, reading, wandering the city, cooking non-vegetarian meals (a new thing), dreaming about apartment renovations, and leading worship along with her husband at their NYC CRC.