Yesterday I penned typed the final words of the final project of the writing program in which I've been engaged since late autumn 2010. From her studio in Salem, OR my writing mentor has assigned a dozen projects designed to build writing chops in someone who wrote her last piece of fiction when she was twelve. In eighteen months I have written, edited and revised thousands of words. A few thousand of those became six short stories, three of which I have submitted for publication. Two were published and one was short-listed for a national literary award. I need - must - do the slog work of getting the others off my hard drive and into an editor's in-box. Many editors' in-boxes. Rejection is an execrable and universal certainty of writing for publication. The form rejection letter is why God made the shredder.
But soon, after I receive feedback from this latest attempt, I will be on my own. No deadline, no direction, no word limit, no encouragement, no criticism. If I felt writing to be a solitary pursuit before, well, welcome to hanging in the wind.
I move forward with the unshakeable feeling that the small successes I've achieved thus far are cosmically laughable, that at some point my writing will gather dust and lurk in the corner next to my abandoned acoustic guitar. My stories will suffer from skills as short as my stubby fingers; like my "C" chord, they will almost - but not quite - make it.
What will keep me writing are the moments when I lose myself in the page, when the story takes over, when the characters wrench the outline from my hands, tear it into shreds and run off in their own direction and I can scarcely type fast enough to keep up. I write for the calm which comes over me, when I have no desire to eat, drink or move for an entire afternoon, yet when I finally rise from the chair to stretch, I am replete and relaxed. I write for the one true sentence (merci, E.H.) that may appear among hundreds of attempts, the sentence for which I can't quite believe I was responsible when I read it later. I write because I have a loving partner who responds to my comments said in jest or dream about wanting to write full-time by catching my hand, looking me in the eye and saying, "I think you should, Julie." I write because I'm afraid of what will become of me if I stop.
I know that really, I'm not alone. In the brief time I have explored my voice as a writer, I have discovered the heart of Seattle's writing community: Richard Hugo House. The handful of Hugo workshops in which I've participated have inspired and terrified me. I have walked away from each with ideas, resources and a sense that I'm not entirely insane. Now that I am free from the obligations and pressures of my writing program, I can't wait to enroll in a long-term Hugo House course. Twitter, of all places, is a community of infinite possibilities. I encounter writers every day and take part in weekly discussion groups with writers of all experience levels. This blog - these pages of rambling, navel-gazing drivel and book reviews - have brought kindred souls into my writing life. My writer's to-do list includes next weekend's Chuckanut Writers Conference in Bellingham, exploring the online courses offered by the Gotham Writers' Workshop and the real-time workshops at Port Townsend's The Writers' Workshoppe.
I will regard this ending as a beginning. Whatever I write from this point forward I write for me, on the steam of my imagination and commitment to practice.The blank pages loom large. The feeling is delicious and disturbing.
*title credit to the brilliant songwriters and musicians The Avett Brothers and their song "Ten Thousand Words." I end my post with additional, painfully fitting, lyrics from this song:
"Ain’t it like most people? I’m no different We love to talk on things we don’t know about"