Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

Across the Atlantic, Rediscovering the Joy of Writing

OPENBUILDINGS.COM Pembroke College at Cambridge University
OPENBUILDINGS.COM
Pembroke College, part of Cambridge University

Pembroke College of Cambridge University in the summer seems like something out of a novel. Expanses of grass (mowed and watered daily), exotic plants framing windows of buildings that have been home to celebrated authors, philosophers and mathematicians, wine served with pig belly in a hall that looks so similar to Hogwarts you expect Dumbledore to give a speech at any minute.

Among all this I am, for the first time in my life, completely alone. I’m in a foreign place with foreign people, with only sporadic opportunities to communicate with the outside world, but also the chance to be taught by the world’s leading novelists, poets and screenwriters, and it’s reminding me why exactly I decided to (hopefully) forgo a traditional career path and pursue writing in the first place.

Besides our intensive workshops, seminars and lectures, twice a week authors distinguished in their genres come to present on almost any topic in the literary world, from penning a successful screenplay to navigating the publishing industry. The thing most striking about all of them is their passion, the kind of passion that hasn’t lost its sheen of childlike wonderment.

David Almond, a primarily children and young adult author, is an older man, although his energy and the youthful spark in his eye would suggest otherwise. He spoke to us about imagination, although for him, this never seemed to be a problem, something he credited immediately to how closely attached he is to his past.

“When I was a 10-year-old boy, I would go to the library and pull books off the shelves and say someday, that will have my name on it,” he told us in his Scottish accent, miming gestures to match almost all of his words. He then went on to describe a trip he took back to that old library as an adult, finding his own novels on the shelves.

“Writing is a lifelong condition, kind of like an illness,” he added.

He told us how he had always been fascinated with the beauty of words on a page, with the inherent imperfection of a novel, with the mess in a writer’s mind that somehow becomes black type on white paper. The way he spoke was the way people talk about falling in love, and it’s so rare to hear someone talk that way about a job.

When I started out at Georgetown as an economics major, I did so because somewhere along the way, someone told me it would be a good idea and I never bothered to stop and take the time to think about why I was doing it. Even now, as an English major, with a firm plan for the future in mind, it can get really discouraging, especially when everyone else can see the payoff from their goals immediately, in paid internships, job offers, promotions in extracurricular activities. But writing is a long process, far from an immediately gratifying one, and often very solitary; it can be hard not to question why you would do something so risky, so societally snubbed, so challenging.

And then you remember. You write because as a child, stories enchanted you. You write because you have fallen in love with words. You write because at the end of the day, no matter how many internships you’ve been offered or other majors you’ve considered, you couldn’t do anything else.

Maybe I’m biased or trying to justify my choice of dream job, but listening to David Almond talk about his relationship with writing makes it seem obvious that people should only do what moves them. I wrote a column about major choices a few weeks ago, but I think more important than deciding on an academic degree is deciding on what you want to do. After all, it may be easy to ignore now, but there’s something very profound in seeing an older, established man choke up while talking about how much he loves what he does, and there’s something enviable about a person who is so in love with his career that he feels as though he has never worked a day in his life.

“Some people ask me if I’m going to retire,” he said, “And I say, retire? I could never stop writing books. To me, writing is as necessary as breathing.”

Kim Bussing is a rising junior in the College. Top Shelf appears every other Wednesday at thehoya.com.

 

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