Never Underestimate the Power of Your Own Words

The comments I get when I tell friends, family, or even strangers that I have published Letters Between Us, my debut novel, usually skip and hop from “Whaddya mean .. . like a real book?” to “What’s the title?”; from “That’s great, and what’s it about?” to “Hmm, I have always wanted to write a novel”; from “Oh really, that’s nice, pass me the Perrier” to “I am writing one too.”

Make no mistake, people are generally happy for me, and I truly appreciate it, but often the facial expressions I see staring at me are the same ones I used to give other published authors I would travel to a book store to hear read, or while attending a writing workshop they were teaching, and usually those looks encompassed staring at them like they were aliens, or super beings. I knew I was certainly not a member of either group. But I wanted to be. My favorite question was: How did you do it? And the response given would range from a vague description of some daily writing work ethic to the often repeated “by sweating blood onto the page.” Afterwards, while I drove back home I’d think: Why can’t I do that? I mean sweat blood on the page, come on, it can’t be that hard. Right?!

The funny thing is that writer’s block got me into writing. I had been a closet writer for years. I kept journals without telling anyone, except my husband. He'd typically say, "Oh, you're writing, that's nice," and change TV channels compulsively on the remote control while I lay next to him jotting down my life as it played itself out. But I never thought of myself as writing — as a writer. I was merely recording events as they occurred. Like a note taker, I filled journals with accounts of my life and that of my two children along with my husband. Others who played a role in my life were also included, family, friends, events, even strangers. This was not “writing” in the authorial sense, in the writerly sense. No. This was secretarial documentation. I thought.

When I tried to sit and write an actual short story, the words jammed up in my head refusing to come forth onto the page no matter how hard I summoned them. I blamed it on the fact that I didn't have a typewriter. When I got a typewriter, I blamed it on the fact that I didn't have a computer. Of course, with a computer, I told myself I would have more time for writing because I wouldn't have to spend all that extra time correcting typos and re-typing pages as I had on the typewriter.

Well, with the purchase of a computer the words were still in a holding pattern in my brain. I tried hanging around friends who were also aspiring writers. Most of them were attempting the romance genre. Something I knew nothing about and never read. I followed them to a writer's conference. The editors from the various publishing houses were half my age, better educated than I was and successful in this genre that I knew wasn't right for me. The more my friends wrote category romance, the more I journaled about how unhappy I was. Prose floated around in my head. These floating “gems” however never came down to earth and were not in the romance genre. Soon I stopped trailing about with these women, so devoted to their formula style of writing. I wanted to write mainstream. When they started getting published, I became depressed. My journal entries had rivers of pages of consonants and vowels but not cohesive stories. Every time I tried to transcribe these bits of sentences, or phrases the river ran even drier. So I just kept on with my journaling.

But the truth is — I was writing. I was writing my life as it occurred in its daily moments. And I was more than just recording the day’s events; I was working them out in a way that did not always reflect the actual daily happenings of my life as lived. Something began to change the more I wrote on a regular basis. And I am not talking about sitting and writing uninterrupted for hours — that doesn’t happen with two little kids in the house. I mean just sticking to this act for 15-20 minutes a day, every day. The words and rhythms took on a different life…I was in fact creating stories. The act of record keeping took on the life of another…and then a short story was born inspired by an event I had experienced, I had heard about, I had recalled from my childhood, or even read about. This was not intentional it just flowed from my pen.

And on a good day, I did not let my inner self critic prevent this fictive reality from taking over my words. Gail Godwin calls it “The Watcher at the Gate” and about her watcher she writes: “I first realized I was not the only writer who had a restraining critic who lived inside me and sapped the juice from green inspirations.” And he is one who, Godwin claims, she allowed to “reject too soon and discriminate too severely.” It is only when we refuse to listen to that watcher, he who must not be obeyed, who wishes to silence our creative inner voice that presses for life to be heard. I didn’t and you shouldn’t either.