Still Writing

What I do know–-what I’ve spent the past couple of decades learning about myself—is that if I’m not writing, I’m not well. If I’m not writing, the world around me is slowly leached of its color. My senses are dulled.

“I have to get lost so I can invent some way out.”

This is the writer’s mind when embarking on a piece of work. We sit perched in front of our laptop screen, or our spiral-bound notebook, or giant desktop monitor, and—we freeze. After all, it’s so important, isn’t it, where we start? Don’t we need a plan? Hadn’t we better know where we’re going? The stakes feel impossibly high. We’re convinced that first word will dictate every word that follows. We are tyrannized by our options. All sorts of voices scream in our heads. First person or third? Present tense or past? The span of five minutes? Or two hundred years? What the hell are we doing? We don’t know.

If I’m not writing, my heart hardens, rather than lifts.

then the wave has won. We don’t want the wave to win. We want to recognize it, accept its power, and even learn to ride it. We want to learn to withstand those wild surges, because everything we need to know, everything valuable, is contained within them.

Here’s a short list of what not to do when you sit down to write.

anted to unearth the sources of my parents’ pain,

The idea of becoming a writer was more remote to me than becoming an astronaut.

peel away the surface was a training ground for who and what I would grow up to become.

o I spent my childhood straining to hear.