Why Write?
I loved to make up stories when I was a kid. It seemed a simple, easy thing to do, back then. As I grew up, I stopped writing stories. Later, I committed to other art forms, and when I wrote sentences, I wrote nonfiction, not stories. In 2010, I began again. I dared myself to try making up stories, by signing up for classes at WriterHouse, the local nonprofit writing center.
Since then, I have slowly gotten more competent through practice, practice, and practice. For thirteen years, I participated in a writer group, which helped immensely.
This writer group provided me with a monthly deadline for producing – well, something. I emailed a Word document out to the others by the late-Friday deadline, every darn month. Well, there were one or two exceptions, when my life was too chaotic. But for thirteen years, I kept to that rhythm.
Good Enough?
Sure, I recognize that I didn’t always send my best work to the other writers in the group. “Best” is relative, measured on a sliding scale. Over time, I raised my standards for what’s good enough to send out to the writer group members. After I allocated more time each month to work on writing, I became dissatisfied with my earlier stories. Now I can predict with confidence that the stories I am pleased with now will one day look a little shabby to me.
Your best doesn’t always look the same
Hushing that voice gets trickier over time. We want to believe we’re improving. We want to believe there’s going to be an audience one day, however small or particularly quirky that audience may reveal itself to be. We want to nourish the creative spirit that energizes our whole enterprise. We want to begin to send work out to people – strangers – not in our writer group. I considered how to start.
The P-Word
To prepare to send work out into the world, I set up a spreadsheet to track my efforts to get published. Then I let the spreadsheet sit for quite a while, untouched. Later on, I added a tab to my spreadsheet with key facts on the publications that most appealed to me – things like deadlines, formatting preferences, lag time before they decide what to publish, method of submission, categories they favor, contact information, etc. The enhanced spreadsheet sat again, for a long break.
More recently, I actually sent a few things out and made entries into the spreadsheet. I’ve gotten more rejections than acceptances, but I keep going, sporadically.
I hesitated to send out my work until I felt satisfied enough with it that it didn’t feel too embarrassing. I chose carefully the places I sent those first few submissions – not too grandiose, and yet consistent with who I am as a writer.
And that just begs the questions, doesn’t it?
Questions
Who am I, as a writer, and why am I doing this? Author Dan Holloway, in Jane Friedman’s blog, said:
“If you don’t know what you want from your writing, what on earth are you doing writing anything? How can you possibly tell whether your words do what you want them to?”
It’s actually not that hard a question. It rests on a more fundamental one. Why do you write?”
Please don’t tell me the answer is “I make art because I must.” To me, that feels lazy and self-aggrandizing in a “poor-me,” humblebrag kind of way. Besides it ignores free will.
Oh. THAT question.
I could tell you I write because I’ve engaged with the challenge to improve my work. The challenge is difficult enough always to involve real effort, yet rewarding enough, because of the progress I am making, to continue to motivate me to get better at it.
I could tell you I write because my life with music was altered when hand surgery made playing instruments too difficult. I could tell you I write because I’ve grown old enough to take a longer and more loving view of life. I could tell you that there’s plenty to love about writing for its own sake. Polishing a story can make my day, even when no one else has seen it yet.
For fun
Also, fun happens. Like the time some visiting non-literary friends asked me to read them a piece after I cooked them dinner. That was a blast. My friend, Claire Elizabeth Cameron, touched on this when she wrote,
“People are doing work for free, work for fun, work for creativity all over the place, and it’s making this world a better place. Success [in writing] is making a connection.”
So why am I writing? To get better at it. To see how much I can improve. To see when my embarrassment-meter gives me the green light to send out more stories to more publications. To see if I receive a green light in return. And, in the meantime, to keep telling stories.
#amwriting
Thanks for reading
~Anne
A version of this post first appeared on BACCALiterary.com