LitCrit by Haley Stokes

It’s about half past 12 on a Monday night. I’ve been home from school for three hours. In that time, I ate dinner, cuddled with my husband, and checked my email. In seven hours I’ll be up and back to work, back to school, back to books, back to notes, back to assignments I haven’t finished.

What’s missing?

Writing. Sitting down with a Diet Coke, a CD, an idea, and the laptop. I turn on the air-conditioner, or I don’t. I turn of the TV, or I don’t. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t make a difference. Nothing matters but the empty page, the blinking cursor, and the characters who long to tell their story.

Writing is no longer a hobby for me. In the past two years it has become something so much more than that. I love school and adore my job, but every single day my resentment grows. How dare the professors pile assignment on top of assignment? Don’t they understand? How dare my boss give me more and more students?  Don’t they see? I have my life, my characters, my worlds, my ideas to tend to.

They slip through my fingers if I leave them too long. They get lost in the shuffle between Brit Lit 1 and Brit Lit 3 and senior seminar. It’s a physical pain. It hurts me to know I’m too busy and too tired to even write a chapter. It hurts me when voices fade because they’ve been ignored.

There are a lot of swords poised to stab a writer. There are a lot of traps, a lot of surprise attacks to stop a writer in her tracks. Self-doubt, recrimination, guilt, insecurity, helplessness…pure insanity in most cases. I can work through all of that. I can push past the basic insecurity and I can forgive myself for dedicating my life to these imaginary people, these flights of fancy.

But I can’t forgive myself for ignoring them. It’s not a race to finish. It’s the need, the desire, the gotta, to see the end.

Time is really my greatest enemy, and it’s winning right now. I help people every day hone their writing skills and mine wilt from lack of use. I read and study people every day who had the talent, skill, imagination, and education to turn a phrase that could make you weep at the simple beauty, and I can’t find a synonym for “tired.” And the beauty I found in literature is being obscured by the frustration that I can only study, never create.

It’ll pass. The semester will come to a close. The year will come to close. I’ll find time and energy again, somewhere. But in the meantime, a piece of me will be held in limbo.

Haley Stokes is a graduate of the English Dept. at the University of La Verne. Google her name for links to her numerous publications. 

© 2004 Haley Stokes

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