As that old song goes “Should I stay or should I go?”

For the last five years or so, I have been trying to return to the writing that I walked away from when I stopped teaching after twenty years. Twenty plus years of not writing, then I began again. Stops and starts; small steps into a poem or blog piece here or there; frenzied thousands of words through the past three years NaNoWriMo and here I am: Where?

My writing may not be as bad as my eye and ear perceive it, but as I grow older, grasp for thoughts, words, concepts with more difficulty–my God, I’ve started using a Thesaurus–I can’t help but wonder what or who benefits by my trudging on. I found myself re-reading some older blog pieces and I can’t deny that rather than improving by writing more, I see less value, less poetry, less rhythm of word and thought three years later.

Yes, walking away from 72,000 words of one mystery and 50,000 of another feels like failure. But would walking away from 100,000 in another year be less soul depleting? My heart says I am on a useless journey; yet my ‘pen’ pushes on, another word, then another until a sentence builds and here I am again. But should I be?

At the crisis point in one of the mysteries I have been writing–and every writer who struggles with the “writer’s journey” and the 3 act structure knows that point comes quite late–my protagonist, almost sure she has been the indirect cause of a death, thinks that there is no reason she should stay in the old neighborhood she has embraced as home, thinks she could move on and be free of the responsibility, the guilt, the pressure to solve the riddle of the first death. But as she paces her apartment, listening to the sounds of the bar she inherited floating up from below, the music, the clink of glasses and bottles, the laughter of her neighbors, she knows she cannot go. She is home.

Late in my third act, writing may be my home, my pen continuing to craft a world, sentence by sentence. That might be my answer.

I’m just not sure it’s the right answer.