The Biblio File September 2019 Essay: “The Fun Part?”
THE FUN PART?
I remember when the urge to write first hit me. I was about forty, and had finally, often painfully, moved through the first four of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. My physical needs were met, I felt safe, was happily married, and felt good about my work as a psychotherapist.
And then—ZAP! WHAP! BANG! Self-actualization, the fifth need, knocked me upside the head with a message so hard and clear, it blinded me to anything else. I want to write. I need to write. Now.
Every morning, before work, I’d pound the keys, so reticent to stop that Ed practically had to pull me away to see my clients. I wrote about whatever came to mind, with little concern for its worth or use or context. It was joyous fun. And, eventually, the characters for a novel came to me, no shadow of a plot, just a burning yearning to bring those characters to life with words.
I’d been a “bookworm” as a child, reveling in The Bobbsey Twins and then teen detective Nancy Drew (“Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” Nancy said, while working on a legally problematic estate case, and I thought that was about the coolest thing I’d ever read). I wanted to be Jo in Little Women, curled into an overstuffed chair, squinting at a page in my notebook as I chewed on my pencil. As I got older, I read southern icons–Tennessee Williams, Toni Morrison, Robert Penn Warren, and I marveled at how they could pull me in and keep me riveted to a story that was fabricated, and yet so real I could feel it. Magic, I thought, the way those writers create. It’s just magic.
Turns out, it’s not magic. I found writing fiction to be hard, often grinding work. I took classes and workshops, hired editors, winced at their criticisms, made significant changes, and, slowly, I built my novel. Natalie Goldberg helped me discover that “betrayal” is powerful for me. I learned, through Elizabeth Strout, to use an emotion I’d felt myself (I picked “shame”), and then blow it up bigtime in my protagonist. I added subplots, removed them, added new ones. I researched black music in the eighties. I had people read my manuscript, some of them African American since I have so many black characters. I listened. I wrote. I edited. I wrote. I edited some more.
During a period when I wasn’t working on my novel, I wrote and published essays in literary journals and published a memoir–”Catching On—Love with an Avid Flyfisher”. It was well received and won a national award. But I struggled to market it, doing readings and signings in bookstores up and down the west coast. I didn’t like the business part. I’m an introvert with an extroverted side, and people often drain me. Selling a book wore me out. I often felt wistful about the good ole days when writing had been, not a business nor a chore, but a passion. A fun one!
My novel is almost done. An artist friend is creating the cover. I don’t have the energy to approach traditional publishers, so I’m exploring how self publishing has changed since my first book. My goal, when I began writing “The Shame Stone”, was to write a good novel, meaning one that’s engaging and makes the reader want to keep reading. My new goal is to handle and present The Shame Stone as an artful gift to the universe, not something I sweat and fret and fuss about. (Well, sure, I’ll send a copy to Oprah, because, you know, Oprah.)
I’m rather amazed to be at this point. I don’t know what’s gonna happen. I do know I want to stay excited about writing, and not get bogged down in the grind. I’ll be on the lookout for the fun part.
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