I’ve gone to several summer writing workshops, and while I find them worthwhile experiences, they tend to attract some interesting folks.

There’s something about writing that draws amateurs to it. They have real jobs or came to writing late, maybe they always wished that they could be professional writers. That, I think, is what gives summer writing workshops the air of the summer camp; the dull hope that one might find an agent and can give up that fake life for one of real, full-time writerly duties.

The first summer writing workshop I attended, all of the members of the class were in their forties or older, except for me. They were really hungry for writing and instruction; I could tell that they had different day jobs, but this was what really excited them. They wrote down every book title our instructor suggested into crisp, yellow legal pads. They wrote in the dormitories after the classes were over, perhaps trying to recreate a college experience wasted completing biology or business degrees.

The second writing workshop I went to was perhaps more intense, but there was also a greater feeling of missing out on a great literary life. The women who were in my class were extremely bitter; they wrote when they could amongst the wails of crying kids and jobs that they didn’t really seem to want. The whole thing was kind of depressing. However, it also made me appreciate that I had had the time and the support at my fingertips for the last four years. But it made question if I could continue? Would I feel that my life was wasted like these women did if I couldn’t pursue writing as a career?

These kind of workshops certainly attract an interesting kind of person. I have mostly hung out with the rarer young twenty-somethings, most of whom want to brag about the journals in which they have been published or where they will go to grad school. The older adults want it more than we can even understand. I met a man once who was a successful New York City attorney, but he wanted to give it up to write mediocre fiction at night school at NYU.

Even though I want to be a writer, I don’t understand why I want to pursue writing or why others want to write, either. We know that it won’t make us immortal. We know that most of our work won’t be read in journals or in self-published manuscripts lingering on bookstore shelves. Fiction is the best thing in the world to me, but I know that if I don’t produce it, someone else will.

Why do you write?