Falling into Compulsion

Peter loved to write. It was his passion, and he was determined to make it his career.

As a young boy he would write stories copying what he was reading or seeing at that moment. He had stories with cowboys and Indians, spies, astronauts, he was inspired by everything.

The more he learnt and grew, the more he started crafting his own style, and you know what, it wasn’t that bad. Peter was not brilliant, but he put in the time and he enjoyed it tremendously.

In high-school he was part of the editorial team and everyone knew him as the writer. This was his identity, and Peter had no doubt that he will be a famous writer when he grows up.

College proved harder to manage than he had expected. Too much noise, too many people, so much competition. Peter found himself working twice as much as before with even less positive results.

He could not join the college newspaper, it felt like it was all a case of you need to know that person or the other, some professor needs to like you, you need to be the sibling of a famous alumni.

Peter found it very hard to make a place for himself, and that eroded his joy and passion of writing.

In a strange way he started to despise writing. It was so hard to make anything of yourself as a writer, in a world in which it seemed everybody had a book in them, and annoyingly most actually wrote it.

Books, books everywhere and not one his.

Life was not as expected for Peter and that made him annoying and unpleasant.

People started avoiding him, the literary circles he was part of stopped inviting him, the book clubs he was so eager to contribute before seemed to have all dissolved.

Life was dull, grey and empty, littered with crushed hopes and shattered dreams.

Peter still needed to finish his school though, that he still had on the road map.

One day, in an English lit class they were tasked with writing a short story in the style of Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal. Peter’s eyes sparkled with joy for the first time in a long time. He loved that story! No, loved is too little, he adored it, the power it had and the power of its writer!

For some reason Peter found it extremely easy to write in the style of Swift. He enjoyed writing again, and when he submitted his story the professor was over the top congratulatory. Peter was over the moon.

That night he could not sleep repeating in his mind the words the professor had used, the reaction of his colleagues, the attention he got from girls that had not even glanced in his direction before. He read and re-read the story and he was in disbelief of how talented he was. That was a good day.

But as things go, the day also went and with it his short lived stardom. Peter was again flung into the murky anonymity he was wallowing in before.

He still had his story though, and although it had clear elements of Swift in it, you had to be a Swift scholar to recognize them, if anyone else read it , it would have been just a really good, witty story.

Peter was not ready to give it up, so he worked it a bit, he reworked the parts that were blatantly Swift and sent it to a magazine in a different state. The magazine loved it! They were happy to buy it and asked for more.

Peter had promised himself that as this was just a test, that he would never write another again as he was not comfortable reworking somebody else’s work.

But when the world went quiet again, Peter could not stand the silence so he went to the library and looked through other stories. He kept well away from Battle of the Books, too famous, but found that A Polite Conversation was perfect for adapting to his world. And so he did.

In the course of two short years, Peter became a well paid author, with his stories now published in a good number of magazines.

His stories were witty, engaging, not too long, just the right length, and people loved him, they loved his youth, his enthusiasm, his ability to see things as they really were and to express them so poignantly in an entertaining way. He was the whole package.

The more praise he got and the higher he climbed the more withdrawn and unpleasant Peter became. In the beginning it had all been wonderful and exciting, but he depended on the works of others. He had tried to sneak in one of his stories, an original one, but his agent said that maybe it needed a bit more work? It did not live up to his other themes.

Peter discovered with sadness that he had seemingly become unable of producing his own ideas. He was great at taking other writers’ themes and reworking them, adapting them to his world, but he was unable to create his own, and that hurt more than the anonymity he had so despised before.

Plus, the stress of being discovered, the constant fear of somebody pointing the finger and showing to the world what a fraud he was, had taken all the pleasure out of his popularity.

What was worse though was the fact the Peter felt like he cannot stop. His urge to write had transformed into a compulsion to take other works and make them his own. Somehow in his highly strung mind he thought that the more he wrote, the less likely it was for other people to doubt his genuine talent, ignoring that what he was writing was not actually his original ideas.

Greatness expected Peter! And he became a very popular author, popular with the masses and not with the scholars, so nobody ever questioned his works, they just enjoyed them and rejoiced in their mirroring of their daily lives.

Peter was never happy, he was annoying and rude, but he was popular and that made people excuse his gruffness. He was a genius after all!