My Life as a Writer

What is your life as a writer like? Do you write for work and or pleasure? What kind of things to you have to write as an adult? When you do write is it texting, computer, paper, journal or other?

--by Laurie Fowler, writer


I have truly enjoyed this blog challenge because I love to write but do not often have the discipline to do on a regular basis. A weekly post about a topic that is fairly easy to write about is doable for me at the moment even in the midst of the winding down of the semester. I have enjoyed not only responding to the prompts, but also reading others’ writing and having them read mine. I crave an audience and haven’t been able to attract one that will comment on my posts on my blog, Fresh Fowlers, until now. After each post in this challenge, someone else in the challenge has commented on my post. I get so excited when I see a comment has been left and even more when I read it.

I know it’s silly, but an audience is so important for a writer; in fact, as important as it is for any other type of artist or performer. I first found this to be true when I wrote a story that dealt with my parent’s divorce and realized I was the audience that needed to read it. I grieved deeply and wept many tears as I wrote that piece in AP English, but it was also cathartic for me to put that scene on paper to help make sense of it. As my teacher put it, “Fowler, your writing always seems to spread weeps.” And so I did not share that piece with anyone outside of my AP class for a long time.

On to more mundane days in my life as a writer. . . I do use writing a great deal in my work as an assistant professor in a College of Education. I write in mostly email format to answer questions from students. They have questions about things because they don’t read the things I write, ironically. I also have written and edited a journal article this year, a grant proposal, several presentation proposals, a blog post for our UWA Online site, and even rewritten the Technology and Education course that I teach. These forms of academic writing don’t excite me much, but I haven’t seen an article in print yet or won a grant for UWA so maybe my excitement will grow if one of those things happens.

I also write quite a bit on my Facebook page and I chat with friends and family. I am still trying to get the hang of Twitter, but I use Plurk lots. I need to be a better commenter on the many blogs I get in my Google Reader daily. Maybe after this challenge is over, I can use the holidays to become a better blog commenter. Hmmm, need to give that some more thought. Maybe others would join me.

I see that most of my writing now is online or digital in some form or fashion, but in our storage unit, you will find boxes of my things from my youth and childhood with journals in my handwriting about the growing up, dealing with parents who divorce, being the oldest, cherishing holidays, the joy of falling in love, the pain of falling out of love, understanding parents have faults, dealing with my own faults, supporting friends, and disappointing friends. And it’s all in tattered, fake denim covered binders with my initials scribbled on them or on loose pieces of notebook paper in a rainbow of inks crammed in a pretty, store bought journal or on the pages of a composition book with a black marbled cover. And when I reflect on my life as a writer, I see the writer I was and how all of those experiences and journals have made me the writer I am and how all the new digital tools I have my at my fingertips now will make me into the writer I will become.