This is my May post for Alex Cavanaugh's Insecure Writer's Support Group. To read more writers helping other writers, click here.
I’m cheating. I wrote this essay five years ago, when the idea of writing as a focus in my life was new. When I found it a few days ago, I liked it so
much; I decided to edit it for IWSG. Back then, I was only writing blog
posts. By now, I’ve accomplished
more, but this essay feels
pure and clean, elemental if you will, and a reminder to cherish the joy. So here you have it…a resurrected post
from April 2009.
Bird by Bird: Some
Instructions on Writing and Life, by Anne Lamott, sits on my bedside
table. It is a library copy, and I admit
here in print, I’ve bent down at least five page corners containing things to
reread and remember. The other night I
was plowing along, marking these inspirational comments because they are real
and they teach and they guide, and I came to a quote that stopped me dead. The author didn’t write it. Before she was published, Lamott submitted a
short story to what she called, “an important magazine editor,” and the guy sent
her a note saying, “You have made the mistake of thinking that everything that
has happened to you is interesting.”
Whoa. Big
swallow. My blog—all about me. I am experiencing a crisis of faith here, so
please bear with me.
You see, I had no conscious plan to start a blog. The first essay poured out of me as a result
of the trauma of a sudden elimination of employment. Writing it made me feel whole and relieved, like
discovering the last segment of a thousand piece jigsaw puzzle under the couch
with the dust bunnies during a good spring cleaning. And so, I kept on.
I look back at some (a lot) of my entries and think, “Yuck,”
or “Does anyone really care?” To my
credit, sometimes I think, “Wow, I wrote that?”
But, it doesn’t matter, because I am so completely in love with the
effort, the words that bubble up day after day.
Some mornings I approach the computer wondering whether there is
anything left to write. But so
far, something always spills out of my fingers, and when I’m done I think, this
is me on the page as best as I can get it, as honestly, and clearly as I know
how to write.
Of course, I hope this practice is helping me to improve,
but hear this. I’m just grateful to be doing
it. Lamott comments on that horrific
response from the editor with the following: “…the note ended up only helping
me because it didn’t stop me.” Turning
to another folded corner I read this:
“Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. The thing you had to force yourself to do—the
actual act of writing—turns out to be the best part.” She's so right. Even harsh criticism is bearable because the
thinking, the imagining, the creating, the editing, the revising, the
massaging–even the hair pulling, this giving birth to words is, as the author points
out, “the best part.”
So, taking a bent page out of Anne Lamott's book, I'm not stopping either.
