Dear, Kitty

I don’t write craft essays because I wouldn’t know what I’d say. What advice I’d give writers. Sugar says you have to “get your ass down to the floor” and write the fuck out of the paper in front of you. Or the blank page on the computer screen if you’re like me and think that saving trees makes up for all the bad you’ve done. I’m some kind of hero, I feel, when I care for Earth.

The thing is I get down on to the floor and wallow in my insecurities and compare myself to every writer I’ve read and met in my M.F.A program. Lorrie Moore says “This is the required pain and suffering.” And I often wonder: when does it ever stop?

Life has taught me something that no writing course has. That is, if you tell yourself you are a writer enough times, you’ll start to believe it. And sooner or later you’ll fool others into believe it too. Manifestation, they call it.

Jay once started a rumor in our circle of friends. He said I pretended to be smart and that I was a shit writer. Admittedly, it hurt me. Caused me to doubt myself. But in front of people that recounted to me what he said I laughed and even told them I felt sorry for him for being unable to attain a high school diploma. 

“To be a writer means to shuffle through every word in your lexicon and to find out that not one word fits that perfect poem you’re hopelessly trying to compose—or that piece of prose that’s been sitting in your notes application, anticipating, waiting, to be stretched wide with a bunch of figurative language.”

If it were true, Kitty, that I was feigning intelligence and being a writer, I think it would take a sharp person with some actual skills to pretend to be as smart as I appeared to him. 

Here’s something useful I’ve learned, Kitty. To be a writer means to shuffle through every word in your lexicon only to find out that not one word fits that perfect poem you’re hopelessly trying to compose—or that piece of prose that’s been sitting in your Notes application, anticipating, waiting, to be stretched wide with a bunch of figurative language. And you won’t use a dictionary or thesaurus because you want to challenge yourself, because it feels like cheating. Like that time you relied on Spark Notes to write a synopsis of Act 1 Scene 2 on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. According to Jay, I was like Viola. Disguised, incognito, and pretending to be someone I wasn’t.

Now it can’t get to me, Kitty. I’m wiser and a tougher bitch. Now, I use people like Jay and their jeers as writing material. I don’t blow their brains off because I don’t write action-packed stories or horror or really anything that’d call for the appearance of a gun. Besides I wouldn’t let people like Jay off the hook that easily. I do write about manipulators, narcissists, abusers, and cheaters, and somehow making Jay a narcissistic, abusive, manipulative cheater, a character so easily hated, is far worse than having his life end in a split second.

Yours Truly

Athena Vasquez