What to Write When You’re Not Writing

“Are you working on a book right now?”

No, I’m not working on a book right now. Not in the truest sense of the word. I have book ideas. I have pages that I wrote months or years ago that I say I’m going to return to and finish. I have the impulse to write and no time to work on my own stuff.

I get asked that question a lot when I’m playing life-catch-up with someone. The question makes sense. Once upon a time, I wrote books. And then I stopped writing books. I got other work that interested me more in the moment, and I went down that road. And those roads led to different roads, taking me farther and farther from book writing until it was something I was looking at from a distance, or, more honestly, looking at in photographs because it was so far behind me that I couldn’t see it anymore.

I feel guilty when I get the question because it feels like other people see that work as part of my identity. So it means that I’m not being Melissa anymore. Whereas I see myself as Melissa, and right now she’s doing X and a while ago she was doing Y, and before that, she was doing Z. But sometimes I wonder if that’s quite right.

I wish I was writing. Maybe that’s the theme for the week: I miss what I used to do. Because what I used to do was part of who I was. So if I’m not doing those things anymore, then I’m not really the same person anymore. Except I am. Or people change, but at the core, I’m still myself.

It’s this thing: I add new things, but I still want to hold on to all the old things. But if I never shed activities or interests or work projects, I won’t keep moving forward. And at the same time, I wonder if I can still call myself a book writer if I’m not actively writing books. And I miss calling myself a book writer, even if that work doesn’t excite me as much as what I’m doing in the moment.

I always think about writers who take years — decades — to write another book. In between, I still think of them as a writer, even if they’re not publishing new work in the interim. Maybe that’s where I am, the interim between books. Or not. I guess I’ll need to wait and see.