My mom is a writer, too. She writes novels. When I was a kid, before computers, she kept her manuscripts in boxes. I knew even then that writers worked day and night, behind closed doors, for months on end to fill their boxes. I thought that novelists were the top of the writer heap. I mean, look at those page counts! Staying up all night to finish a chapter! And then one glorious day, a bound book is born!–a thing they can hold, and know that the heft of words in their hands is entirely the fruit of their labor. That they created a whole world people could slip into. And people would want to stay there for days or weeks–however long it might take to read the thing.
For me, that was the only real writing. That was the pinnacle. But I don’t seem to have the stamina or focus for writing a novel. I get bored of my characters. I tire of my own voice. I sabotage my ideas at some point along the way and decide it’s all stupid–the plot, the twist, all of it. Sometimes I think I decided to write poetry out of laziness. Or impatience.
But maybe not? Maybe I’m not a marathon runner in writing, I’m a sprinter. My ideas leap out of the starting blocks and surge into something in a hurry. Like a tulip, I spring up fast, stick with it out a week or two, then peter out. But tulips are nice, right? I’ve always appreciated a tulip. I’ve always admired the sprinters. They’re not less of a runner than a marathoner, right? Just different types of muscle, something different in our brains.