Kelly DeLong

After decades of writing, I have discovered a single truth—there is only one reason to write and that is for the sense of satisfaction I get from sitting at my desk a couple hours a day, putting to paper the life inside my head.  For me, there is no other reason to write.  There can’t be.  It’s pretty clear by now that I’ll never make a living at it, never win a major award and never become famous.  Moreover, if I stopped writing today, other than me, there is no one who would care.

That might sound sad or pathetic, but it’s not.  I began writing in the first place because I’d always known that there was something inside of me that needed a release.  The more I wrote, the more I felt I accomplished something that was important to me.  For years I wrote without a thought about publishing or making money.  I just wanted to write.  I needed to write.  It was as simple as that.

When I was a teenager I wrote stuff I called “poetry.”  I was quite proud of it, so much so that I showed it to my speech professor at the community college I attended.  Rumor had it he was a poet.  A week after handing him a stack of my work, I entered his office and asked him what he thought.  He shook his head and handed my pages back to me.  On the top poem, he’d written “What is this?” and “This doesn’t make sense.”  I discovered that day that I wasn’t a poet.  But that didn’t stop me from taking a poetry workshop at the state university I transferred to.  In that class I learned that in order to write in a particular genre, you actually had to read that particular genre.  I didn’t read poetry, which was one of the reasons I struggled to write it.

Still, I had to write.   I’d grown up a non-reader, who just got by in school.  Not until I was twenty did I finally start reading books on my own.  By the time I found my way to a fiction workshop, I’d been voraciously reading novels and short stories for a little over a year.  That might not sound like a long time, but it was enough for me to conclude that the release I needed would come from writing fiction.  I had found my form.

I wrote when in school, when out of school, when I was working full-time jobs.  Nothing killed my love of writing fiction.  I made my way to an MFA program, and after seven years of writing, I published my first short story in a magazine that wasn’t affiliated with the school I attended.  It would take several years before I published something else.  Of course, when I say publish, I’m talking about placing a story in a magazine with a circulation of fifty.  I knew my work was only being read by about three or four people (I’m including my mother). I was gratified though that somebody out there thought my work was worth the time it took to put it in print.

Eventually, I published a couple of pieces in magazines that actually paid money, and, then, one of the great surprises of my life happened—a publisher wanted to publish not one but two of my manuscripts.  I would have two books published!  The publisher was new, very small (a one-man operation) and couldn’t pay an advance.  I didn’t mind.  I was elated.  Bigger things were certainly headed my way.  I just knew that my books would sell and that my next book would be picked up by a major publisher who would pay me a big advance, and, as a result of my book’s success, prestigious magazines would solicit stories from me, providing me with an audience who was emotionally connected to my writing and who would pay to keep that connection.

I soon learned though that my books, like most of the thousands and thousands of books published every year, are read by next to no one.  Also, getting my stories published by literary magazines—big or small—was as difficult as ever.  It felt to me that after nearly thirty years of writing, I had gotten nowhere.  I reached the realization that my work would have an emotional connection to no one since no one was reading it.  My writing hadn’t had an effect on anyone.  That knowledge, I have to admit, pained and depressed me for a while.

It did not stop me from writing, however.  I reached the conclusion that my writing had a tremendous effect on one person’s life.  Mine.  It had shaped my life, had pushed me to practice, to improve, to reach a certain level of competency and skill that nearly everyone would like to achieve no matter what they do.  Writing has become a part of who I am.  It doesn’t matter if no one else knows it.  I know it.  That’s enough.  I’ll always be the only person who’s read all my work. I’ll always be the only person who cares about every word, every punctuation mark I put on the page.  So be it.  I have spent countless hours as my desk contemplating my creations, and I have valued every minute of it.

Kelly DeLong is published in many literary journals including The Sun, Evansville Review, The Jabberwock Review, Roanoke Review, Palo Alto Review, among others. He is also the author of the novel The Poor Sucker. Further, his non-fiction book, The Freshman Year at an HBCU was published last year.