Hi. My name is Aaron Pogue, and I'm a writer.

Before anything else, I’m a writer. That has been true for as long as I can remember. When I was six my granddad taught me how to type, smashing stiff keys on a battered old typewriter without ever glancing at my fingers. I would tell the story of the quick brown fox over and over again, and whenever I made a mistake I’d advance the paper two short twists and start over. When I was nine my teacher instructed everyone in the class to write a one-page story using at least half of our spelling words for the week, and I wrote eight pages and used them all. I made that the first in a series of absurd detective stories that I developed over the course of the year. When I was twelve my family moved to the big city, and I dealt with the frightening upheaval in my life by writing my first novel. I wrote my classmates into the story to make friends.

I remember when I was in high school I spent an afternoon patiently explaining to my dad that I didn’t need to go to college. My only goal in life was to be a writer, and I already knew how to write. I was well into my second novel by then, and I was marking up my Creative Writing teacher’s noir mystery in my free time. His wisdom prevailed, though, and when I got to college, I discovered not only the limits of my understanding but also the real value of others’ ideas. I chose Oklahoma Christian University for its creative writing program, and took a writing class every semester for four years. In the process I learned the rules of the craft, I learned to develop my narrative voice, and I learned how powerful a diversity of styles can be. I’ve since had the opportunity to coach my dad in creative writing, and I was able to teach him using some of the same methods I learned in that college program I’d once assured him I would never need.

In teaching I found the most important lesson I’ve learned in the twenty-three years since I started teasing sentences out of the resistant keys of my granddad’s old typewriter: writing is a collaborative experience. Every time a writer puts pen to paper it’s a teaching and learning process. I’ve spent the last seven years working as a technical writer for a paycheck, much of it generating government documentation, and that career demands the rigid pursuit of pure, unembellished communication. The work is not creative writing, but it still demands all the tools of the writer’s craft. More than that, this profession drives home the point time and time again, that writing is teaching. Every project I work on requires me to learn and then to communicate my understanding to a new audience. The material I work with can be excruciatingly dull, but the process makes me a better writer, every day.

I’m not going to be a technical writer forever, though. I would like to teach, and that’s a big part of why I’m pursuing a Masters degree now. I started a year and a half ago, when I sent an email to my dad and my older sister telling them it was time to stop talking about writing and start doing it. The email started with the words, “Next month, you’re going to write a novel.” I spent a busy October guiding them through a series of pre-writing exercises designed to get them ready to participate in National Novel Writing Month during November. National Novel Writing Month is a challenge to complete a 50,000 word novel in thirty days, and we all three succeeded. In the process my dad and my sister gained a lot of self-confidence, and I learned a love for teaching creative writing. I’ve worked with both of them ever since, and taken on a handful of other students. I’ve even started work on a guidebook for National Novel Writing Month, and I hope the Nonfiction Book courses in this Masters program will help me turn the notes and half-finished chapters I’ve got so far into a tool useful to all new writers. Ultimately I would love to teach on the collegiate level, bringing my passion for creative writing to students just beginning to discover that there is a craft to it all.

Before anything else, though, I’m a writer. I wrote my third and fourth novels in college – the first pair in a trilogy – and I’ve been trying to get them published ever since. In the meantime, I have never put the pen down. Since college, I’ve worked on a fantasy novel with a political message, a four-book series of mainstream thrillers, and most recently a long series of sci-fi murder mysteries. I currently have seven finished novels of publishable quality, and two more in development that I hope to finish this year. I have an agent and complete submission packages for all my finished works, but I haven’t yet seen publication. Getting published is my goal, though. That’s my real intent. I want to see my books on the shelves at Barnes and Noble, and I’m prepared to do whatever I must to make it happen. Right now, that means enrolling in the Masters of Professional Writing program at OU. For the first time in years I’ll have the chance to mingle with other dedicated writers, to hone my craft and dedicate my time and energy to the process of becoming a successful writer. I look forward to the opportunity to share my experience, to the potential for teaching somewhere down the line, and to the prestige of the title the program will grant me. Mostly, though, I look forward to being one step closer to my goal – to being a professional writer.