Why I Write
Nonfiction by Brittany Coy-Pinnock
Untitled by Aura Hurtado (2023)
The best part about elementary school was how each teacher had a personal library right inside the classroom. I could sit on a plush carpet and take my time choosing what book I wanted to read. Another Junie B. Jones adventure, a few days with the Baudelaire siblings, pretty much anything written by Roald Dahl. The problem was, I wasn’t great at returning them when I was done. I’d sign out weeks worth of books, eventually notice my growing pile, then spend a few days sneaking in handfuls of 3–5 books at a time before my teacher realized how many were missing.
In grade 4, the last day of school snuck up on me and when my mom came to wake me up, she found me panicking over the huge pile of books I had yet to return. She insisted I pack them into plastic bags and bring them back.
I was sure Mr. G would be mad; we were only supposed to sign out one book at a time! I hid the books among my things on my hook and spent the day looking for an opportunity to replace them without being spotted. It never came. So as the hallways emptied after the final bell, six hours worth of panic spilled over and down my face. The tight knots of the plastic bags cut off the circulation in my fingers and no matter how many times I swallowed, the burning lump in the back of my throat wouldn’t go away.
“Brittany, what’s wrong?”
I couldn’t look him in the eyes. “I have to return these books. I borrowed them.”
“Why are you crying?”
“Because you’re gonna be mad. The rules say one at a time.”
He laughed and knelt to my eye level. “Look at me. Do I seem mad?”
I blinked through my tears and found him smiling, bright like the red hair on his head. “No.”
“Of course I’m not mad; I’m happy you enjoyed the books. I can’t believe you read all these in one year.”
I wiped my snotty nose with my sleeve and stuck my chin out. “Actually, I read more.”
I’d been a reader for as long as I can remember, and I often read three or four books at a time. When I started at a new school, the library was the first place I visited. I would wander through the metal stacks and brush my fingers along creased spines and skim for all the books I might like to read.
My first taste of horror came in the fifth grade with Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, an anthology of horror stories for children written by Alvin Schwartz. My reactions to the stories (and the terrifying images that accompanied them) were visceral. My hands shook, and at times I had to physically hold back screams. I loved it. Horror remains one of my favourite genres to this day. Being afraid within a controlled environment is such a deeply cathartic experience. But then again, a lot of reading is.
I made my way through the Young Adult section of my public library during middle school. Some of my favourites included Uglies, the four-book series by Scott Westerfeld and The Inheritance Cycle series by Christopher Paolini. The CHERUB series by Robert Muchamore quite literally changed my life and for years, I dreamt of becoming a kid spy.
Breaking Dawn, the fourth book in the Twilight series by Stephanie Meyers was released the summer after grade 6. Lucky for me, my mom had to go to Walmart the day it happened. We hopped into the mini van, and we drove with the windows down in light, late-Friday-morning traffic down Ninth Line to Argentia, listening to 680 News. I asked her to buy the book for me and she agreed, and I took the car keys so I could start reading while she finished the shopping. I don’t remember getting home, just landing curled up in the suede armchair next to the living room window with the sun heating up my face, breathing in the smell of fresh paper with a water bottle and a snack in my lap. I spent the better part of two days in that chair reading 756 pages. Except for the hour when my mom made me go outside, and I sat on the backyard porch. I will never get tired of the soothing immersion of getting lost in a book.
By the time I turned thirteen, I’d read every young adult novel I had any interest in reading and turned my attention to the adult section of my library. This was around the time I entered grade 8. We’d gotten our homeroom assignments on the last day of school the year before and when I told the outgoing eight graders who I got, they looked at me with pity.
“Mrs. P, she’s a tough one,” they said. “Good luck.”
Mrs. P became my favourite teacher within the first week. Most of my English teachers did. During our short story unit, we read and discussed “On the Sidewalk Bleeding” by Evan Hunter and had an accompanying assignment in which we had to write our own short story. I told Mrs. P my idea and she said it wouldn’t work for what the assignment required. I knew she was wrong, so I wrote it anyways.
She wasn’t wrong.
Even if she had been, I loved writing it so much, I wouldn’t have stopped at the word limit. At the time, my family owned one shared desktop computer and my mother’s laptop, so for portability, I wrote my story by hand on looseleaf sheets of paper I kept in a binder. Eighty-seven spitefully written pages is how I stumbled across my passion. Sounds about right.
It took the rest of grade 8 to finish writing that story, then I spent all four years of high school rewriting it into a 200K-word monstrosity that made its way around the halls in batches. Students I didn’t usually talk to told me how much they loved my story while I wondered how they got their hands on it. I found a lot of my favourite authors then. Eric Jerome Dickey. Kelley Armstrong. Sister Souljah. In the end, I graduated with a diploma, a couple of scholarships, a story I was insanely proud of, and a one-way ticket to the Bachelor of Life Sciences program at the University of Toronto, the first phase of my fifteen-year plan to become a forensic pathologist.
It would be nearly four years before I wrote again.
One of my classmates in the Bachelor of Creative and Professional Writing program at Humber College recommended I read My Year of Rest and Relaxation, a novel by Ottessa Moshfegh. At the time of this writing, I’m on chapter two and the psychology major in me is fascinated by the unnamed protagonist. With her unaddressed trauma surrounding her parents, her codependent relationship with her best friend, Reva, and her mutually self-destructive alliance with psychiatrist, Dr. Tuttle, she’s a brilliant character study. Beyond this, I identify deeply with her quest to sleep.
I spent a great chunk of my last two years at UofT asleep. Moshfegh’s protagonist uses a cauldron of prescription medications to stay asleep. I wasn’t that fancy; I just had marijuana. It did the job. I wonder what it would have been like to read this book back then, to recognize my numbness reflected to me. I had four days of classes each week and attempted to attend two. I was lucky if I made it to one, usually to hand in an assignment or write an exam. I rarely ate, I isolated myself from friends, and I was barely passing most of my courses. Sometimes, entire days would pass without me leaving my bed.
I think of that period of my life as my Trough of Hell, as described by H.R. D’Costa in her writing craft book of the same name. D’Costa calls this the “all is lost moment.” Jessica Brody calls it the Dark Night of the Soul beat in her book, Save the Cat! Writes a Novel. It’s the beat immediately after the protagonist suffers a major setback in the story, when they hit their rock bottom.
You know how people say there’s a silver lining in everything? Well, the silver lining of hitting rock bottom is that, if you can find the will to survive, it’s only up from there. While completing an assignment in my local library, I happened across one of my favourite books from high school and started to read again. I reacquainted myself with old favourites, like Jennifer Estep’s Elemental Assassin series and found new favourites like N.K. Jemisin and Tananarive Due.
A dozen books later, I was revisiting some of my old work and from there it was a matter of time until I was writing again. It took a year of blowing off my degree in progress in favour of writing before I seriously considered it a career option. It was another three years before I took the necessary steps to make it happen. Through it all, I never stopped writing again.
But why write in the first place?
It’s a curious thing, the call of the writer, the urge to put words on a page. To take a thing so intangible as a whisper of a thought and make it physical without knowing with any certainty where it will end up or how it will be received. To understand the writer, you first have to understand the drive to create.
If you’ve ever had a child, or started a business, or baked a cake just because, then you know what I mean. There’s a magic that happens when you create something from nothing, when you take a sum of miscellaneous parts and create one, entirely separate, whole.
Only a writer can understand what happens when I sit at my desk littered with dried rice grains and cookie crumbs shoved carelessly to a corner after I ate dinner at my computer last night. When I look at my white-board calendar covered in motivational quotes scribbled on colourful Post-Its, or the cork vision board covered in my manifestations for 2024, none of which are as real to me as Antoinette, the vampire tech-head I created in 2017 after asking myself, what if vampires hated the taste of blood?
What if?
Two words with the power of the universe behind them.
What if I found a meter-high stack of money wrapped in plastic on some wooden pallets in the basement of the new house I bought? What if my daughter was possessed by a demon? What if I ran into my ex? Three questions that facilitated some of the best writing I’ve done this year so far. What if my sister’s name is called at the reaping? Hunger Games. What if I was sent to a detention center where they made us dig all day? Holes. What if my sister’s boyfriends kept mysteriously dying? My Sister, the Serial Killer.
Only another writer could understand my distress when I look at a blank page and my stomach twists because I have to fill it. The way my nails tap against the desk when words don’t immediately come to me, or how when the skin on my forehead tightens, I know it’s going to be a tough writing session. Sometimes, I force myself to stay at the desk and I fight through the tension headache. Other times, I run to the dirty dishes in the sink, or to the sunshine beaming brightly over the sparkling blue of Lake Ontario that beckons me outside. Still, sometimes it feels out of my hands, and I’m affixed to my chair by some power greater than I, who insists I put these words to paper, even if just for myself.
I write to stop the nagging compulsion of a character who simply won’t leave me alone. Who haunts me day after day with demands that I portal them into this world. Most stories begin slowly, clumsily, like a first date with a stranger. Some will pick up steady momentum to the end while others peter out after a few sentences and still others hit a wall abruptly in the middle. Some plotlines meander and waver and then, like a mirage in a desert, they shimmer into your eyeline, and you somehow see clearly to the end. Many others remain elusive all the way, demanding a release of control, so even the last sentence is a surprise to you, the creator. Most magical of all: those ideas that strike when you least expect them. Maybe a first line pops into your mind on the drive to work, or a laundry detergent commercial makes you ask, ‘what if?’ And when you sit at the computer, the story unfolds across your screen as if some unseen narrator whispers in your ear and all you have to do is type.
I write in anticipation for the days I’m so beautifully in tune with my writing, I don’t come out of focus until hunger pains twist in my chest. For the projects where I struggle for hours, days, weeks, and finally taste the euphoria when a piece turns out better than I could have imagined. I write despite the days I feel I have no right to call myself a writer. When I walk away from hours straining over the keyboard with only a handful of awkward sentences to show for my labour.
I write for the moment of God-like satisfaction when someone cries where I meant them to cry, loves the characters I created to be loved, and gets excited about the passages I recited to myself as I fell asleep because I couldn’t stop thinking about them either. For the perfect sentence that rolls off your tongue, or the moment when a diddling plot falls into place.
I write for the potential to create a character that resonates as deeply as Peter Nowalk’s Annalise Keating resonated with me. She was angry like me, but different because she didn’t make apologies for it. She was the first darkskin black woman I ever saw tell an old white man to shut up without a hint of fear in her voice. He felt the power barely contained in her body, saw the fury in her eyes, and witnessed for himself the ten steps her brain took while he pondered her audacity, and he shut up.
I write in hopes that maybe one day, something I put out into the world will do for others what Kelley Armstrong’s Bitten did for me at my lowest. When it planted a seed of hope in my heart by reminding me of a time when I was happy. Truthfully, I could give you a million reasons why I do this, but there’s only one that matters.
I write because it’s what I was born to do.
Brittany Coy-Pinnock is a student in the Bachelor of Creative and Professional Writing program at Humber College. Her favourite genres are paranormal, psychological thriller, horror, and fantasy, but she loves storytelling in any form including music, films, and fashion. Her immediate focus is on creating short stories in which characters are forced to confront difficult, often buried, emotions. When she’s not writing, she’s exploring Toronto in search of her next favourite meal or view of Lake Ontario. Otherwise, you can find her curled up somewhere warm with a good book.