I’m possessed!
Have I told you I’m writing a novel!? My head is spinning, but I’m less than one days’ worth of words behind on the time frame of 30 days until 50k words. I love it! I happen to also be liking the novel itself, steeped as it is in all the very difficult questions I’ve been pondering my whole life. You won’t be surprised if I confess that I have to work at keeping the plot moving along, will you?
But! when I do come back to answer the question, “okay, what happens next,” some pretty fun things happen next. I even surprised myself by introducing a new character today. An important one.
One of my other characters suddenly became a smoker and I thought, “that’s so perfect! Exactly. Of course she would.” Literary inevitability. Accidentally. Such fun!
One of my friends not too long ago commented how she’s thought of writing but she doesn’t have the imperative to do it and she believes writers must have the imperative. They must feel the need to do the writing.
Our college professor, the venerable Lawrence Owen, said the difference between writers and non-writers is that writers write. Of course he let us guess all sorts of more Romantic answers first. And he liked saying “no” to our answers. “Oh hell no,” the look on his face said. I love him still.
He was so right.
My sweet Girl said recently, “write the books, Mom. Who says you can’t be a famous author? It would be such a waste if you didn’t at least try. What are you afraid of?”
I’ll tell you what. I am afraid of failing and I am afraid of succeeding. It’s a thing I’ve wanted forever. It’s one of those things like breathing with my lungs. I know I was designed to do this. And I may find I suck at it. Some higher authority may come along with a big rubber stamp and write SUCKAGE all over the thing I create.
It may be that no one will read it. No one may be moved by it even if they do read it. No one may even care about the inherent commentary or the underlying themes (Remember students: the comment or statement the author makes about human life.) Believe me, I have plenty of comments and statements to make about human life. And I have stories to tell. Mine and yours and everyone else’s.
Maybe I will succeed and you will read what I write and you will love it or hate it or respond to it or let it make you feel all sorts of intense things. But you will pay for it and be willing to pay for it and feel better for having read it and send me e-mails you hope I will answer but I’ll be too busy to get to all of them so I will hire a secretary to field my e-mails and the offers for hundreds of thousands of dollar book contracts gathering dust on my desk since I will slyly publish on the internet and make a mint from that and the speaking engagements I will have to keep to a minimum in order to preserve my own sanity. Who knows?
That could happen. And that sounds pretty scary to me too, even though I prefer the second scenario. A lot.
I have come to the point, however, where not doing the writing itself is more painful than taking the risk. So I am doing it. As silly as it seems. As clichéd as it seems. (Did you ever hear, for example, so many people saying, “hmmmm, I’ve always wanted to paint a picture. I have a gorgeous picture in my mind and I know I could put it out there, but I’m just not sure I should do it.”) So believe me, I know how ludicrous it sounds that I am joining the ranks of millions of people who have to get their gumption up to even DO the ART.
Dang, I feel suddenly pathetic for all this neurotic hemming and hawing. I’m writing the damn books, people. Like it or love it. I’m writing the damn books. Every last one of them that seems to come next after this one is finished.
“Is it true?” Larry would ask me during my independent study with him where I churned out a new draft, a brand new story every single week all semester. I let my friend Dan hack it up as best he could before I fixed it and presented it to Larry. Invariably, Larry still went to town on the draft. “Is it true? Cuz I’m only interested in true stories,” he’s say. Then he’d grin mischievously beneath his mustache. “And they’re all true, Beth. They are all true.”
And I am going to tell them. Every last one.
Exactly. Yes. All true. You are a writer and you should write. Needing to get up the gumption is completely natural.
Yesterday I had a convo with a student who’s trying to convince me to participate in NaNoWriMo with him and I told him what I’d told you. He’d just had a discussion about Nausea in which Sartre said something about experience not being real unless it’s written. Perhaps that’s true, but experience can be “written” in lots of ways. The music I play on the piano, the yarn that passes through my fingers as I knit, the stitches on my hats: all of those things are the expressions of my experience and just as valid as putting words on the page. Which is why I’m a pianist, a milliner and a knitter, but in the end, I’m just not a writer. I can write. I can make a point coherently and well. I can persuade, and I can describe. But I’m not a writer. You are.
That I am, darling! Yes, indeed. And I feel comfortable saying that because I’m doing it. But also cuz I know it’s how I’m made. And there’s some sort of crazy kind of wonderful in embracing what I truly know about myself.
And you are right. You are doing your art; in every way that is what matters most.