Still writing

I caught up with a high school friend the other day. "Are you still writing?" he asked, amidst all the chat about broken romances and family additions and career crossroads.

"Yes," I said, a little taken aback because I can't imagine not writing, whether my stories get published or not. There may be a hiatus of days or even months, but the stories sit patiently, and I always return.

But it's my fault he had to ask; all my close friends know that I write fiction, but their knowledge stops there. I don't actually discuss the process or the results of my writing, letting their ignorance remain untroubled. I suppose I don't want to be peppered with tiresome questions: "So when are you going to finish your Harry Potter?" Or: "Hey, I hear there are some online publishers these days — you should look into them." And the perennial favorite, "Can you name a character after me?"

I will not expose my friend's name to the wide Internet, but let's say it wouldn't have fit into the high fantasy I was working on.

So I shut down conversational gambits about my writing. I am ruthless. I find trigger topics, ones that never fail to elicit emotional responses from my friends and therefore conveniently change the subject. For the unusually persistent I have an arsenal of vague responses, ready promises to send along a copy of anything I finish that might align with their reading tastes (and chances of that compatibility are pretty low, in my opinion).

They probably have images of me hunched over a typewriter in a dimly lit vault somewhere underground, only accessible via a dark passage through a hidden grandfather clock, so secretive am I about the fruits of my labor. It's not that I'm not ashamed. But it's just too personal, too intimate a part of me to expose in gory detail to people who would care enough about me to listen, but who don't care enough about writing to understand. Someone I know who's involved with graphic novels is tired of telling people that he doesn't write Garfield-like cartoons. He used to painstakingly distinguish his work from Jim Davis's, but then the other person would end the conversation on a joking note: "Hey, let me know if a strip of yours ends up in my local newspaper!" He stopped trying to explain. It's like telling your friend about how you took a trip to Italy to recover from a divorce, and he says, "So did you bring me back anything?"

At the same time, when I turn down the chance to go out with friends the previous Friday night, or any evening at all during the month of November (NaNoWriMo), I've got to tell them something when they ask what I did instead. "There's a vault," I might say…

I think we have a routine now, a sort of truce. "I'm still writing," I say. And that's all. And then we talk about something else.