Why I Am A Novelist

I met up with my book club tonight and we started talking about writing and all that good stuff that is fun to talk about when you're eating at a pie place, and a dicussion of me and my own writing came up. It honesty was nice being able to openly say out loud that I am a novelist. It's not that it's hard admitting that I'm a novelist, but it's hard admitting that I am not all the other things that a novelist isn't.

Confused yet?

Basically, what I mean is we spend all this time learning about our identities as human beings and learning about all the different parts of ourselves. In school, we learn about how multitasking is a good thing. We learn that we have to be a good worker and student and sibling and daughter and everything else all at the same time. We're taught by the American Dream to be everything at once.

For the longest time, I've struggled with my writing in that I've felt like I have to be versatile at poems, scripts, and all of the above. Even though my heart has always been with novels, I've felt like I couldn't commit to just that. The writing industry feels like a nonmonogamous industry where you're suppposed to sleep with as many different writing forms as you can to prove that you are good in bed. I really hope people get this analogy.

The reason I love novels is because my personality is an Attacher. I'm an Attacher. I get so attached to characters, so mcuh so I need to write out their entire life story. I'm someone who enjoys character development over several events, not over just one event on one page. I can't make short stories or poems work very well. I'm not saying I'm atrocious but I do write better novels than I do shorter works. I just feel pressured to do them all.

What I've come to realize though is I'd rather just focus on what I love. I want to put all my work into my novels. And so what if that's all I want to construct. It shouldn't make me any less of a writer than someone who is everything at once. I feel like I can do better when I focus really hard on one thing.

I think what's made me struggle so much is how vague and loose of a term writer is. I need to start calling myself a novelist instead of a writer because every time I call myself a writer it's like there's a million responsiblities of me that come with it.

I've decided to take some time for just my novels, and that's why I've been on a little blog break. That and because of schoolwork. If what I want to do is publish novels when I get older, I'm done stressing so much over being well-rounded. I can be well-rounded within novel writing.

You are allowed to say no. This is what I've been learning my whole life and what I've finally decided to start listening to. You can be qualified to do a ton of different things but if you have a lot on your plate and you have different priorities, you can say no. Please give yourself the permission, it's so freeing once you do.