To A Future Writer: The Fantasy of the Perfect Writer

Inner editors are full of reasons not to write your story: so why add to the chorus? We asked participants in our Young Writers Program to write a letter to their future selves about their hopes, dreams, and reminders of what they love about creating on the page. (Want to write your own? Check out our #ToAFutureWriter campaign on June 12!) Today, Lou hopes Future Lou will learn to live easily with her own expectations:

Lou of the Future,

Last night, aware that the deadline for this letter was 48 hours away, and equally aware that it was a meaningful and flattering opportunity for a 19-year-old fledgling writer, I did what you’ve come to expect of me: I procrastinated. I locked the door to my family’s small, somewhat dingy bathroom with a book of steampunk short stories under my arm, and ran myself a bath with bubbles in it.

This is not a particularly new habit of mine. I’m hoping that time has changed my terrible habits of conflict-avoidance, but I’m sure that my future self will still remember how hard the first few months of 2014 have been. Despite having committed myself to the creative writing major a few short months before my December graduation from the local community college, I hadn’t done it. I hadn’t become her. Become, I so desperately hope, you: the person who is a real writer, and not a fraud.

And so instead of occupying her role in life, and spending my evening honing my craft, I played with bubbles and pretended to be Private Natalie of the Quiltbadger Airship.

I’m sorry. I should say that right now. No matter how good your camouflage is, no matter how proud I am of you for trying, you are never going to be that girl who wears a talented writer skin with ease. You’re going to pick at it when no one’s looking. You’re going to lock yourself away every so often, so you can pretend to be something more glamorous than herself.

And somewhere along the line, I’d like you to realize that that is what being a writer is.

These last few months, I’ve made some pretty stupid decisions and some pretty smart ones. I’ve spent days in a haze of anxiety, because I made the decision that no matter how out-of-place I feel, I’m going to college in the fall to study writing. Not to hold writing as a secret dream anymore, not to tell myself that someday, when I’m a picture-perfect pinnacle of a girl, I’ll become a writer. But to be a writer, no matter how messy and confusing it might be.

And so I’ve been scared. Scared that this person I want to be is never going to exist, and scared that I’m going to run amok through her designated path in life, making a mockery of everything I hoped you’d become. I’m scared that my decision to continue writing is not going to make this any easier, and that no matter how many times I assert myself as a real-life writer, I’m still going to act like an anxious kid with pathetically heartfelt dreams of doing something grown-up. And I’m scared that committing to writing won’t make me any better at it, and that even when I do improve, I’ll never reach those heights I dream of when I hide from the real world and just play pretend.

But then again. Even when I refused to even look at this letter, even when I stuffed my ears with bubble bath and blocked my thoughts with goggles and airships and Victorian dresses, a part of me drifted away from this safe haven I created. No matter what anxiety was there, no matter what fear, I couldn’t keep my head from drifting off the page to my own clockwork heroine.

I might not be living up to my own expectations, and you might not either. But I’m keeping the stories alive, and I’m making sure that you will, too. And for that, I should say that you’re welcome.

All my love,

Lou of the Past

Louise Kendrick, 19, is a socially awkward creature whose comfort zone consists of her dogs, fantasy, and, from 2008-2013, the Young Writers Program of NaNoWriMo. Her hobbies include knitting, playing flute, and daydreaming about a point in her future where her life is perfectly together and she has a troupe of rabbits named after her favorite fictional characters. You may know her by her online username, Ser thayanora, because she has never quite given up on her dream of becoming a knight.