The Evolution of a Writer

by PJ McIlvaine

I’m often asked about when I first knew that I wanted to become a writer. Well, not to put too fine a point on it, it’s like asking me when I first realized that my eyes were brown. Like most kids, I aspired to be different things: a nurse, a doctor, President of the United States. Deep down, though, I always knew that I was writer. Maybe other people didn’t see me as such, but I did.

I remember vividly the day I came home from grade school and learned from my tearful grandmother that JFK had been shot. I quickly banged out a newsletter informing my hungry readership (brother, grandparents and mother), of the shocking event. I felt awful, but strangely good, at the same time.

Later on, I graduated to short stories and novels. One short story of mine was eventually buried, thanks to my sixth grade teacher Mr. Bryant, in the cornerstone/time capsule of the district’s brand new elementary school. For the ceremony, I wore a cute lace mini dress and high heels, which I practiced walking in for weeks before the big dedication ceremony.
All that came crashing down on me when in seventh grade, I asked my English teacher to be my sponsor in a young author’s contest. He flat out refused and not very nicely, either. His reason? He refused to believe that I had written the story all by lonesome myself.
I was devastated. I didn’t write for several years afterwards.

Eventually I began writing again. Stories, essays, song lyrics, letters to the Editor. Mind you, this was before PC’s were, you know, PC. I went to college, became a columnist and staff writer for the college rag. I flirted, albeit briefly, with the idea of becoming lawyers after my grandparents were ripped off by a landlord. I even transferred to a college in New Hampshire that had a sterling criminal justice program.

I lasted one year. I couldn’t ignore the siren call of writing any longer. I sold a personal essay to the New York Times. I think I was paid the princely sum of fifty bucks. It could have been fifty cents. I was a bonafide, paid, published author!

I’ve been writing ever since. I’ve written through illness. Through pregnancies, labor, good jobs, bad jobs, funerals, kids screaming around me, kids throwing up on me, driving, baking, holidays.

Writing, at least my kind of writing, isn’t something I put in my lingerie drawer and take out on Saturday night. It’s ongoing. Evolving. Sometimes, (okay, a lot), I question my choices. If I had known in my twenties what I know now, would I have done things differently? Hell yes. I would have gone to California. I would have gotten a job in the entertainment industry and hopefully worked my up to Oscar. In an alternate universe, I could have been Diablo Cody. Or Susannah Grant. Or Tony Gilroy. All right, maybe not Tony Gilroy, at least not without a sex change.
However, if I had done that, I might not have had the life I had. Met the people I did. Loved the people I did. Did the things I did. Had my kids. I might have had somebody else’s kids. Maybe I wouldn’t have had kids at all. What kind of a writer would have that made me?

So now when somebody asks me when did I first realize that I wanted to be a writer…I say, very casually, oh, like yesterday. It saves me a lot of trouble and unnecessary operations.

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