It occurred to me today that we are all just wanting it to be.

So, I’ve had a bit of a love affair with a band that most of you have probably never heard of. They’ve never really been famous. I’m not sure that they’ve even ever had a hit on the top charts. But, back in the late 90s and early oughts, I was listening to them a lot. Something about their lyrics, the style of their music, and the vocal qualities of the lead singer just had me hooked.

The name of the band is Sister Hazel. To say that I’ve been having a love affair with them is probably an exaggeration. Truth be told, I only own two or three of their albums — according to some light research that I’ve completed just now on iTunes, they are up to nine or ten albums. However, I still listen to those couple of albums these days. I even went to see them live once — on the event of a friend of mine turning twenty-one, he and I went to see Sister Hazel in a bar in South Bend. I remember much about that evening, although the friendship hasn’t really stood the test of time, mostly because I turned out to be a less-than-faithful friend.

Bygones.

In any case, I should probably get to my point before I lose you entirely. This band, Sister Hazel, had two or three songs that really resonated with me lyrically, early on. One of them was a song called, “Wanted It To Be”. In it, the lead singer laments the end of a romantic relationship, describing the failings of the relationship in some detail, but moreover, just talking about how badly they’d wanted it to be.

I think that the reason for that song being musically important to me is the concept of wanting something to be. And the reality that wanting something to be doesn’t necessarily make it so.

* * *

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the movie “Pinocchio”. My reasons for thinking about this movie have been related to my writing, and the developments that are occurring in the world of my writing endeavors. I finished my first novel in May, after announcing in March that I was going to take a break from this blog in order to finish the novel. Since then, I had a few copies of the novel made, and I handed them off to people that I am trusting with the task of reading the novel and sharing their thoughts with me. I’ve already received one of the copies back –thanks are constantly due to my ever-loving wife– and I’ve started using the reader input to make the novel even better.

And the reason that this has anything to do with Pinocchio is related to my topic in the first section of this essay. Wanting something to be always results in either it not ending up being, or it ending up being. In “Pinocchio”, the toy puppet wants to be a real boy. And, as we all know, that’s how it ends up for him — ‘yay’ for happy endings. But, throughout the movie, it’s not as if Pinocchio is setting about, through a specific course of prescribed actions, to become a real boy. In the end, it’s determined that he is a worthy of becoming a real boy because of the characteristics that he possesses that would suggest that he’s been a real boy all along.

Pinocchio wanted to become a real boy, but he already was — in the ways that are most significantly important. And I’ve wanted to be a writer, to become one. But, what I’ve most recently discovered is that anyone who wants to be a writer has to be someone who writes. As backward as it might sound for me to describe to you the fact that I –in my mind– disconnected the idea of being a writer from the idea of being someone who writes, that’s the way that I thought about it for a very long time.

At the moment, I’m reminded of Yoda, telling Luke, “Do, or do not; there is no ‘try’.”

* * *

Without getting into a philosophical or existential argument about being versus becoming, it’s occurred to me that wanting to be a writer isn’t enough. Wanting to become a writer isn’t even enough, although it’s most certainly closer to the truth of the matter inasmuch as it’s more likely to contain in it some action toward the goal.

At the end of the day, I’ve discovered that I’m a writer because I write. Because I seek to entertain by telling a story through written words. Because I have ideas for stories to tell that I capture in documents that I then share with other people. And, while there are other, more grandiose definitions of the word “writer”, those definitions are just the result of the splitting of hairs that we all do. The question of whether Pinocchio was a real boy had more to do with Pinocchio’s belief that he wasn’t a real boy than it did with any objective observations of his reality. In reality, the puppet was a real boy in the same way that something which walks like a duck and talks like a duck is most likely a duck.

Will I ever be a famous writer? Who knows? Will I ever accomplish the dream of being able to walk into a Barnes & Noble and pull a copy of my book off of a shelf? I can’t rightly say. Will the New York Times Best Seller List ever feature my name? I won’t conjecture. But, in the interests of drawing a line in the sand for myself, let me say this:

I am now a writer, something I’ve always wanted to be. Just call me Pinocchio.