I, Writer

What are my aspirations as a Vocal creator in the new year?

What are my aspirations as a creator?

What are my aspirations?

I feel like I’m getting grilled by my date’s dad in high school. What are you planning to do with your life? Well, gee, Mr. Smith, that’s a hard question. Really I’m just trying to get a kiss at midnight. Besides, introspection has never been my forte. Maybe I don’t dedicate enough time to it, but maybe no one does. Some people get lucky and it comes in a sweeping moment, an all-encompassing vision as the clock nears twelve. The year ahead is projected on the wall before them, starring a fitter, more confident version of themselves, a version who works out more, drinks less, actually listens to their Instagram time limit and makes a better effort to call their mother every Sunday. These lucky ones sip their champagne and bask in these high-resolution resolutions, warmed by their premonition, prophecy, pipe dream, whatever, and start the new year with resolve and a confidence that this time they’ll stick to their guns. This is the year all their goals are reached.

My countdown countenance was sorely lacking in this sort of clarity. In fact, having drunk two too many Pabst Blue Ribbons, I was asleep in bed when the ball dropped, so that’s one dropped ball already in twenty twenty four. But let’s say I resist the urge to write off the year before it’s really even begun and decide to change tack while there is still time. Aim myself towards my aspirations. Okay, great. You’ve sold me. Here I am, motivated and raring to go. That still doesn’t answer the question.

What are my aspirations?

Let’s start small and work our way up. I want a house with a big library, wainscotting on the walls, and a porch for sipping espresso that overlooks a body of water. I don’t even like straight espresso, but the idea to me has always been synonymous with success. I want a loving, beautiful wife who all my friends are obsessed with, and I want their jealousy to physically hurt. I want friends who are loyal and would never let their jealousy get between us. I want eighty or ninety acres, mostly wooded, with two hills that come together and catch the sun where it sets in the west. Maybe there is a dock for fishing and a small boat, or at the very least a canoe. I want people to think I’m smart, even though I dropped out of university. I want people to read what I write.

Right, writing. Get back to the point, Miguel. This is about writing.

Something you might not know about me is that I recently finished my first novel. It was a long, joyous, difficult, self-discovering, self-doubting, hair-pulling journey that berated me constantly with the whole spectrum of human emotion. Considering it primarily entailed countless hours of sitting alone in my apartment, it was a surprisingly diverse experience. At times, I felt great surges of pride. At others, I felt almost immeasurably stupid. As of this moment I’m still not exactly sure how I feel about my book, but I do know that I got to sit in a coffee shop with my partner while she read through my novel and listen to her laugh out loud at multiple points. (Because it is a humor novel, I even had the pleasure of assuming she was laughing with me and not at me.) That moment made it all worth it.

And then you have a book and nothing is different, other than the fact that now you have a book.

More likely than not, my partner and my mother will be the only people who ever read it. It’s my first novel, and I’m young and have a lot to learn, so it would take a miracle for it to get published. Still, I’m glad I wrote it. And I would write it again. I didn’t write it with the expectation that it would get published and bring fame and fortune, I just wrote it because I wanted to improve my craft. I wrote that book not because it needed to be written, but because I needed to write a book.

Aspiration: I want to be a novelist.

That’s a good one. Probably the truest dream I have, one that has been with me since I was a three-year-old who found a duotang from a concrete company on a railroad track and mistook it for a manuscript carrying case. I lifted the leather duotang inscribed with the name of the concrete company in bold letters in the air and said “Mom, I’m gonna write books,” and she had tears in her eyes and she said “Okay, Miguel,” and she crumpled up the concrete company’s documents and hoped they weren’t important. (I have since tried to fit my manuscript in this leather duotang. It is woefully undersized for anything longer than a plot summary. But I still like to keep it around.)

So we’ve narrowed down the Great™ aspiration, but it isn’t like I can aim to become a novelist in twenty twenty four. That would be an irrational, masochistic goal for the new year. It also wouldn’t tackle my goals on this platform, Vocal. But that’s okay because that is just the broad aspiration, the dream, the forest, so to speak. What we need to look at are some individual trees.

So once again, from the top.

What are my aspirations as a Vocal creator in the new year?

One: The reason I began using Vocal was to write and write diversely. I am not a fantasy writer, but I enjoyed writing in the fantasy challenge. Similarly, I am not a sci-fi writer, but the New Worlds challenge exercised imaginative muscles that would have otherwise stayed limp. So this year I will keep writing, and keep writing different things.

Two: Stop only submitting to challenges with the highest monetary award. That isn’t why I’m doing this.

Three: Writing is a lonely endeavor. A community of writers could help with that. I need to use Vocal as it is intended and engage more with others and their writing.

Four: Have fun here. This is the space to love what I do. It can be stressful submitting my stories to literary magazines and trying to find an agent and all those other stupid things a person has to do if they actually want anyone to read what they write. Vocal operates differently; it is supportive, open, and stress free. There are no repercussions to publishing here, even if the story is a total, no-good misfire. So publish more.

And Five: Look back with pride on what I have done and continue to do. Every story gets a little better. Every plot is a little richer and every character a little more compelling than the last. Sure, there will be exceptions to this rule; writing isn’t a linear slope of constant infallible improvement. But I am improving. I recognize that, and I need to continue recognizing it and stop giving myself such a hard time for not popping out of the womb as fully grown Nobel laureate John Steinbeck.

Okay. That’s a handsome list of resolutions. Not too rigorous and in no way unreasonable. In fact, it’s all surprisingly self-aware. Here I have a road map to, well if not to success, at least to building a better life in writing. One where I am happier, more productive, and less hard on myself. And that’s the real goal, isn’t it?

Oh, and before I forget - Happy New Year.