As a Christian who came to faith in my teens, within the context of the evangelical church, I am acutely aware of the role of narrative in conversion. In many ways, we are taught, if by nothing else, by sheer repetition, the acceptable narratives of conversion. Ultimately, it is a play on the “I once was lost but now I see.” It presupposes a “pre” in which we point out the various sins of our lives, and these can be as sensational as substance abuse to something as seemingly innocuous as “pride.” But these sins must be stated in some detailed, concrete way. For example, a “bad” conversion story would speak in vague terms, such as, I used to be really prideful and then I found Jesus. A “better” one, would talk about the role of pride in my life, for example, the way I snubbed my friends and called Ms. A a bitch and refused to apologize. These are, of course, representative, in that the converted is not required to catalogue every sin or every category of sin. One must, however, impart a sense of reflection concerning one’s sin, you must “get it,” the fact that you sinned and this is bad news.

The second piece of the narrative is the moment of realization. Yes, it is necessarily to pinpoint some (fictional) moment at which you realized the extend of your sin, and the inescapability of it. You need to say that at some period of your life, if not a minute, then a series of days or weeks, in which you could say, damn, I absolutely suck and am in some need of rescue.

Then, there must be the coming to terms of this inescapability. Here the narratives may diverge based on the theological context of the believer. For some, it is only necessary to repent/assent via “the prayer.” For others, it must be accompanied by some sort of act, perhaps you went to church, or confessed to an elder, or received baptism, or sold your possessions and gave them to the poor. The radicalness of the act places you theologically, and also gives you a faithfulness quotient. The more radical, usually, the more faithful you are.

This is peculiar, yes, idiosyncratic, yes, but not entirely bad. We all construct narratives, fictions in our lives to explain away certain things. It is, perhaps, the examinations of these fictions which might give us some insight into the underlying assumptions, the governing principles of that particular thing.

For now, I’m primarily concerned with the similarity by which it seems that we, as writers, feel a need to construct a narrative for the becoming of a writer. An extremely common question is something along the lines of “when/why did you decide to write/become a writer?” This presupposes, of course, that there was some decisive moment in which you converted from pre-writer to post-writer. The interesting thing is that this narrative forces you to create two selves, a self which was unconscious of the innate writerliness which was within you, and a self which became conscious of this innate writerliness and decided, through the act of writing, to coax it out.

It also presupposes that the identity of a writer is connected to an intensely personal choice. For example, the question is not, “when were you discovered as a writer?” Or, “when did somebody else tell you you were a writer?” It is not a conferred position, such as a government appointee. Yet when we consider the writer at large, it is completely connected to whether or not the writer has reached the public domain. In other words, if your local grocer has a novel sitting at home, finished and beautiful and typed out in manuscript form, we still wouldn’t call him a writer, until we had seen his work in print.

Enter the MFA/MA candidate. What in the hell is he/she? He is semi-validated, in the sense that this is not just a self-appointed writerliness, this is a place in which somebody “higher up,” some “established writer,” read your work out of a pile of several hundred, and decided that for that year you happen to show the most promise/talent. This means you’re not a bad writer, you’re actually pretty good compared the “average,” but it also means you’re not quite there either. You’re not so awesome that you are one of the higher ups judging the awesomeness of other writers.

So you kind of receive a provisional writer badge. You get some kind of permission to say, “I’m a writer,” and not feel like a complete ass.