A Writer Looks at Thirty

I turned thirty on Wednesday, and I don't know what to write.

Throughout my teens, my literary outlet was the pop/rock song. By the time my adolescence had faded in my early twenties, I'd written over a hundred of them, and while dreams of a musician's stardom lingered for several years, the songs faded as well. (Although not so quickly that I wasn't able to translate them into rough recordings and sheet music.)

My early-to-mid twenties brought poetry and fiction. Some short stories. A novel. And these I took so far as to self publish. This outlet has not faded. Indeed, the follow-up to A Whispering Through the Branches — a novel in verse — calls to me persistently, despite my persistently shushing it to patient silence.

As thirty has approached, the sentences that I've strung together have been in the service of nonfiction commentary. Here, as readers of Dust in the Light are surely aware, I've gotten so far as to have others pay to publish what I've written. Nonetheless, I didn't manage to make that pay sufficient to cover life's necessities, and for the time being, those necessities have bottomed out the scale on the side of work.

Carpentry shares some inherent qualities with writing. There's a certain degree of creativity mixed with a larger degree of problem solving (the mixture depending on the specifics of the task, or genre, at hand). Each craft justifies the verb "construction." Some of the urges that lead me to write are partially fulfilled in my day job. Yet, carpentry is not writing, and even if some prestidigitation with perspective and metaphor could help me to see it as such, I do not want it to be the defining literary outlet of my thirties.

So I suppose I misspoke. I do know what to write. What I do not know is from where I'll draw the time. The old hands on the construction site assure me that a thirty-year-old has plenty of time. Perhaps they're right, and perhaps I should take oblong comfort in my impatience and sense of immediacy to write; it has something of the feel of youth.