By last Wednesday morning, I’d written four articles for the week. I was up early, doing the homework that got shunted to the side by deadlines, when I took a break to scroll blearily through my phone. I came across a blog post by a Crystal Duan, a Facebook friend of mine, about her competing loves of creative writing and journalism. I go to a liberal arts school without a journalism program, and two weeks ago I declared as a Creative Writing major. On the surface, I made the opposite decision Crystal did. I thought that for me, the tension between fictional and journalistic writing was finally over. Yet I couldn’t believe how much I related to Crystal’s essay:
“I’ve always both appreciated my imagination, yet held it at arm’s length. My original childhood dream was being an author. I wanted to create. At around age 14, I dismissed this and took to dreaming about newspapers and magazines. I wanted to feel real.”
I may not be a journalism major, but I write for and/or edit four weekly platforms. Usually that amounts to writing three or four articles a week; this week it was six. I felt burnt out, suffocated, and frustrated as to why I wasn’t putting all this time into what I actually love.
Like Crystal, I dreamed of being an author when I was a child. Before I even knew how to write, I would walk in circles in my backyard, telling myself stories. Nothing made me happier than sitting in front of a step and using it like a desk, making up countries and drawing their maps and alphabets. I had a turquoise clipboard folder, painted with my name, in which I kept the maps, the alphabets, elaborate family trees, and stories. It was all I ever wanted to do. When I was in third grade, I wrote a 100+ page story about a girl who fled the Irish Potato Famine. In my mind, 100 pages made it a “real story,” and I wrote unselfconsciously towards that goal in a wide ruled spiral notebook.
I was a strange little girl: I couldn’t do cartwheels, I had only the most tenuous grasp on what Radio Disney was, I never knew what to talk about with other kids, and there was a specific dread that settled in my throat when everyone started playing the hand-clapping games I could never remember. But I could write, and writing made me happier, and prouder, than anything else. My love of writing never wavered, but I lost touch almost completely with fiction.
At my high school, it sometimes felt like everyone and their mother (woohoo women in STEM) was an aspiring engineer. I don’t remember hearing about English majors (let alone Creative Writing majors) outside the context of contemptuous jokes. This came entirely from other students, not teachers. I had teachers whose encouragement brought me to tears, including a high school newspaper adviser who—clichés aside—changed my life. The school climate, though, had me reflexively putting myself down. When asked what I wanted to do, I would say, “Oh, I think I want to major in English or journalism, but I don’t know what I want to do with that, [self-deprecating laugh], I know it’s kind of useless.” Like Crystal, I dismissed my dream. I dismissed it in favor of what I saw as the most “practical” skill available to someone whose only skill was writing: journalism.
I don’t regret it, because high school newspaper was one of the most positive experiences of my life. I met and worked with some of my favorite people. I learned news writing, InDesign, AP Style, and how to balance deadlines and homework. Later, I learned how to edit and manage a team. If I’m facing a two-hour deadline, I know I can do it because I’ve done it a hundred times before. More significantly, I learned how to deal with painful shyness in a professional way. Before interviewing someone, I used to wish the ground would open up beneath me and swallow me whole. But I found that I could always knock on the door, send the email, dial the phone and get it done. Honestly, I do still feel that dread sometimes, but at this point I have been interviewing people so often and for so long that I can easily sidestep that imagined fissure in the ground.
The summer after my junior year, my interest in journalism also opened up a unique opportunity, the “Medill Cherubs” program at Northwestern University (which Crystal attended the year before I did). I met some of the most interesting and driven people I know that summer, while writing articles every day. I began my senior year certain I wanted to major in journalism. Then April rolled around and I was deciding between j-school and Hamilton. No matter how hard I tried to persuade myself that it was what I wanted, I hated the idea of dedicating myself to news. Finally, at the very end of the month, I chose Hamilton. In making that decision, I was incredibly fortunate to have the support and encouragement of my parents. They saw, more clearly than I did, how badly I wanted to go to a liberal arts school.
In a way, I do still love journalism—the Sunday New York Times is my single greatest pleasure—and I believe wholeheartedly in its unique societal power. Every time I check Facebook, I see my friends from Cherubs or my high school newspaper linking to their impressive work and elevating the voices of others. I’m so proud of them, but I know it’s not for me.
Even at Hamilton, I fought my desire to major in creative writing. There was a vicious voice in my head telling me it was a useless major, that my skills were useless, that I was useless. I just used the past tense as though that voice disappeared, but it still comes by to chat sometimes. However, I took a fiction workshop last semester that confirmed my decision. I produced more fiction than I had in years, and every story idea possessed me. I could stay up writing, happily, past four in the morning. Ideas for dialogue scrolled through my brain like a news ticker when I ran on the treadmill. Sometimes, I wouldn’t be able to resist working on my stories in the margins of my notebooks for other classes, writing as unselfconsciously as I did in third grade, now in college ruled notebooks. That class was transformational, but since I don’t have an academic outlet for fiction this semester, I feel like journalism is taking over again.
All of this brings me back to my six article week: I didn’t write this to complain about any of these opportunities for which I am so grateful. I took them on willingly, and I learn more with every article I write. I am lucky enough to have an on-campus job that lets me practice a skill I value, I’m proud of the work I do as a news editor for my school’s newspaper, and writing for a satire paper is just plain fun. As for this platform, I use it as a chance to write in my own voice (i.e. not my “An assembly of students, faculty and administrators met Feb. 24 to discuss the implementation of a campus policy...” news writing voice). Without the weekly deadline this platform provides, I wouldn’t be doing this kind of writing consistently or even at all.
Fiction is what I love, but all kinds of writing help me improve as a writer. I know that journalism has given me an ear for dialogue and discipline when it comes to word counts and deadlines. More than that, it’s helped me get out of my head and into the world, where the stories are.
