[I sent the following to Goddard College as part of my application to particpate in their Master of Fine Arts for Creative Writing program. The requirement here was to write a personal statement that explains why I want to receive the degree, how I hope to use the degree, why I think Goddard's unique program is right for me, and to comment on my strengths and weaknesses as a writer. For some reason, I also want to share this with you, since, after all, you are the folks who are subjected to my writing week in and week out. I hope you enjoy it...for what it is.]

You want me to tell you why I want to be a writer.

I cannot. For I do not want to be a writer.

I am a writer.

What I want to be is a good writer. The difference is a lifetime.

The word “good” here does not relate to a movement of appreciation. While I would find pleasure in the notion that people might enjoy my text, that appreciation is not the object of my desire. I write this now, in fact, in a style that denies you the pleasure of this aspect of my writing. I do not want to be pretty for you. When I write that I want to be a good writer, I mean “good” in an ethical sense. When you have finished looking at my text, I want you to walk away better than you were. Whether you ascribe this betterment to me is none of my concern. I simply want you to be better.

I want goodness to flow through me. I am not able to do this in person. We are creatures of instincts, discontented and civilized animals. We all have issues. I bring them with me to every personal interaction, and only through the rare exertion of tremendous mental effort am I able to allay them. Talking with you in person, I ride the waves of time and sensation, a solitary man adrift in a lightning storm. Writing to you on the page, however, I become the God above the storm. I direct the clouds, stir the seas, and drive time forward, rewinding when necessary, then forward again, with all the mistakes recreated for graceful serendipity. But here, here, there is no one adrift; rather, a subject going along for the ride.

I do not want to be a writer. I am a writer.

We are all empty swirling cones of interacting forces. We are defined not by the objects that surround us, but by the empty hole formed by the objects. Your body is what it is because of the space it occupies. But what about you? What does your “you” look like? We are all empty swirling cones of interacting forces.

The world moves through us. The world is not just the trees, the dirt, the flowers. It is light. It is sound waves. It is fragrance. It is lips on lips. We open our mouths and the world comes out. We lay our fingers on the keyboard and shoot the world back into itself. In speaking, we are the guns. In writing, we pull the trigger ourselves.

But violence has no place here. The metaphor is incorrect. Not incorrect because the metaphor describes writing falsely, but rather, because it demonstrates a writing that I do not accept as my own. That metaphor, however, flowed through me. The writer that some think I should be would go back and delete that paragraph. Or this one.

And all of the others that would follow if they came in the same self-referential crap that they started in.

Because the writer that I want to be gives you everything that you want, holding back nothing, releasing it all to you, for you to do with what you want. The choice is yours. My creations are yours. Cast them aside if you wish.

I am a male writer, and I am pro-choice.

But if you were to keep them, imagine what might happen.

I want to be your imagination. Not because you don’t have one, but because I want you to be able to let yours rest once in a while. I want to be the ocean you can submerge yourself in, that you can relax upon as you look up into the clouds. I want to be here for you, but I want your attention directed elsewhere.

Right now, it is not. It is here. On the page. This page that I type into. When I stop to take a sip from the beer by my side, I want you to stop and take a sip from the beer at your side. Or do you have a glass of wine? I once read a book called If on a winter’s night a traveler, by Italo Calvino. It begins with a love letter to the reader and it is, perhaps the most beautiful thing I’ve ever read. There was a man who knew his reader.

How many love letters have you gotten? I fear that it is not enough. It never is enough. I apologize for that. I apologize on behalf of every writer who has ever loved you. It’s been a long time since Homer has sung for the muse.

We are not here to write history, you and I. We are here to be history. And this is where history is made, in the conversations between people. You and I are history making machines. And this machine kills fascists. I want to write that machine. I want to be Woody Guthrie. I want to slay kings. I want to be Shakespeare. I want to destroy gods. I want to be Prometheus.

I want to pass the world on.

To you.

But you’ll never hear that from me.

The world is silent in me.

And so I will myself to silence.

Because all I ever want you to find here is the world.

And I want it to be a good world. A world that you’d like to find yourself in.

This is not that world. There doesn’t appear to be enough room for you in this personal statement. But the writer that I want to be is the writer that could write such a world. You will not find what I am looking for here. Because this is just a load of bullshit.
I’ve been trying for a long time to be the writer who had something to say. But then I realized that the writer I want to be is the writer who just says it, though that’s the wrong way to put it. I want to talk about J.R.R. Tolkien. The reason is because that man knew how to write a world. Say what you will, but I’ve read Ulysses and I’d put The Lord of the Rings in its category any day of the week. Both Joyce and Tolkien were creating worlds. Using a style that destroyed the narrative, Joyce constructed a completely imaginary inner-world that perfectly reflected the mythologies of our reality. Tolkien, on the other hand, embraced the narrative tradition, and he developed a completely imaginary outer-world that found its meaning only in the reality of its myths.

I want to write Ulysses, but I want it to be set in the Middle Earth of my own creation. I don’t want you to find your world here. Nor do I want you to find mine. I want you simply to find a world that you want to be in. The best hope that I could possibly have is that you would walk way, inspired to create a world of your own. With any luck, I someday hope to find myself there.

I know that I can do this. And this is where faith sometimes gets scary. I speak here of your faith. My own is far beyond a simple faith, which finds its limit at the beginning of the intangible; mine is the faith that has touched the intangible. Yours, however, is a faith that must always be won. It is never a question of your desire, but only a question of my stamina.

But I don’t want to speak of that. I want to speak of my experience. I want to speak of those times that confirmed my faith. You do not know them, and I want to share them with you, if only to reaffirm your faith. This is not the voice of a prophet, but rather, a priest who looks out at his congregation on Christmas Eve and decides to preach to all the backdoor Catholics, to preach as they did in Medieval times, the way the Bishops preached to the aristocracy.

I have experienced the intangible. I have sat alone in a room and been brought to tears by the power of writing. I have pursued that same experience the way a gardener pursues his seeds. I have cultivated those experiences and watched them grow, in bounty, in beauty, and with intensity.

But fuck the poetry. I’m just taking the long way around of telling you about my Liberal Arts education. Sorry, but I’m just not sure how to write a writing resume. You can’t just lay it all out in bullet form, you know what I mean?

Listen, I’m 29. I’ve worked as a professional copywriter for six years. For the last four of those years, I’ve been in college, where I officially received a degree that I made up. Literally. I made it up. It’s called Self-Design in Theories of Writing. What I’m trying to tell you is that I got paid to write, and I’ve studied the theories of writing. I’m both a professional and an academic. And while I aspire to be neither of those things, it sure would help if I had a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing.

But let’s go back to the Self-Design thing for a moment. I gotta give you a little bit history on that. And I’m not going to lie to you: I was going to stop here on page three (the minimum for the application), but I really want to tell you this story.

Wouldn’t it be cool if you turned the page and I had written this incredible story all about how I applied to Goddard as an undergrad, but that Goddard shut down its residence program that year and sent me off to Green Mountain College instead? Imagine if I had written the whole thing from the perspective of my…I don’t know…special pen, or some shit, and you got to see how I took an independent study in my freshman year, and how amazing it was to realize that, because of the special program that I was in — a program called The Progressive Program — that I could get away with studying whatever I wanted, and that there was nothing, including the college, standing in my way, and how I even ended up being the student representative on the board that governed the Progressive Program, so not only was I responsible for deciding what I wanted to study, I was also responsible for deciding how I was going to study it. And maybe there could have even been a scene (based on a true event) where the evil registrar lady once cursed my name in a public forum because I took too many independent studies, just an awesome scene with a blue-haired lady in pointy, black-rimmed glasses, frothing at the mouth, holding my transcripts high in the air and rattling them in disgust, as if the very notion of independent learning reminded her of the dirt on the floor of her mother’s country cabin. And wouldn’t it have been awesome if I had somehow connected the concept of the individual to a grain of dirt, which might have connected back up with the gardening thing I mentioned before, as growth connects with freedom through the roots of liberal, and perhaps all of that philosophical crap could have come out of the mouth of some other professor at the forum, a professor who supported the notion of independent learning, a professor who, coincidences be damned, ended up being a gardener and the son of a priest?

That might have been cool.

But let’s go back to the Self-Design thing for a moment. I gotta give you a little bit of history on that. And I’m not going to lie to you.

I applied to Goddard College as an undergraduate candidate to start in the fall of 2002. I don’t remember the acceptance letter. I was living in an apartment in Boston; well, Brighton, really. I lived there with my best friend. We’d known each other since people don’t even know each other. I’m talking babyhood. Pictures to prove it. Best friends. Great guy. You should really get to know him.

Anyway, we’re livin’ in Brighton, which is the little college section on the outskirts of the city. Boston College is right there, but you’re a good 25-minute ride from downtown. So in Brighton, all you got is B.C. It’s like the whole town is its campus. Everywhere you go, there’s young people. And sure, there are older people too, and some damn fine ones. ‘Course, I’d be lying if I said I really got to know any of them, but most people are fine once you get to know them.

Anyway, we’d been living there since, I don’t know, the year before or something, and the two of us, well, we were just at a really interesting point in each of our lives. He had just graduated college. I had just come out of a major relationship. Both of us not really liking our jobs. He was doing customer relationship type stuff for a huge microchip company and I was a copywriter for a recruitment advertising agency.

But for that year and a half, we just had a blast, though it was a very conscious blast. Four days out of the week — and maybe this part ain’t true, but it’s what I remember — four days out of the week, we’d come home and sit on opposite couches and talk about life. I’ve never been through therapy because I’ve never had the need. There’s nothing like sitting on a couch and talking to a knowledgeable friend. Did I mention that he was a psychology and economics major in college? It was a very good year on the couch.

Anyway, at the end of that year and a half, we had both talked each other into trying something new with our lives. He went off to get his M.B.A., and I went off to get my B.A. While it didn’t actually occur in one day, it was only on that last day that I decided to keep going as far as I could with my writing. This is not to go as far as I can. But to keep going beyond even the moment when I can. To write myself beyond my abilities. To progress beyond the limits.

It has gotten me this far.

–

Do I have a weakness as a writer? The answer is yes. I have not written what I wanted to write. While there may be a thousand reasons for that, one of the ones I would like to cross out is craft. It’s a major suspect.

— The evidence?

— Do you want evidence as to why craft is guilty or why craft is innocent?

— Guilty or innocent of what?

— What?

— Guilty or innocent of what?

— Um…

Is that a loss of discipline? I suppose so, but I include it to show it off. Now, I know that I should strike it out, but if I’m to demonstrate my weaknesses, then I should demonstrate my weaknesses. See, this is my way of telling you that I understand the difference between showing and telling, but that like all writers, I sometimes can’t tell the difference.

Wasn’t that clever?

— Perhaps cleverness did it?

— Um…did what?

— That’s what I’m asking you, sir!

Really, is this supposed to be some sort of…

— Um…

— I rest my case.

— Don’t forget to mention the fact that you can’t write a story to save your life.

— See, that’s just not nice.

— But it’s true. That same friend you were just talking about has pretty much confirmed it for you.

— Fine, it might be true. But I guess it depends on what you mean by story.

I’ll be the one who does the talking here, thank you very much.

I’ve been told that I can’t write a story. I know I can’t write John Grisham, that’s for damn sure. Now there’s a man who knows how to make you turn the page. Neal Stephenson too. But perhaps the one of the finest page-turners I ever read was House of Leaves, by Mark Danielewski. That book had it all. Terror, humor, cleverness, philosophy, excitement, sex, gossip; it just had everything. Bastard.

The fact that I’ve been told I can’t write a story has injured me. It has caused me to expel my energy in directions that do not satisfy me. I am speaking specifically of the blogosphere.

I maintain a weblog. I write on it almost every day of the week. I’ve maintained this blog for just over two years now, and contrary to many people’s experience in the blogosphere, my pace of posting has only increased with time. I post about politics, entertainment, technology, philosophy, and, once every couple of weeks, about something that is occurring in my life. On top of that, I spend a good deal of time surfing the Internet, looking for articles that I can recommend to my visitors using a neat little blog feature called “Asides,” which sits to the side of the main area on the blog.

I want to become better at blogging, not because I want to be popular on the web (though that would be nice), but rather, because it requires a style of writing that I would like to be able to have at my disposal.

But while investigating the blog style has allowed me to feel proactive towards the development of my writing, it has stolen the precious time that I would have preferred to have directed towards fiction.

My weakness? My weakness is that I haven’t written House of Leaves. That I haven’t written The Lord of the Rings. That I haven’t written Ulysses. And that I haven’t written If on a winter’s night a traveler. That’s the writer I want to be. If I can’t, then that’s my weakness. And it’s time to really work that out, because damn it, I’m gonna be.