Wow, I’m writing …
“If you could do anything you wanted and knew you would not fail, what would you do?” Such a classic coach question to lob to a client. “I would write,” I blurted out without thought or volition. Then immediately thought, “Wow, where did THAT come from?” I’ve always been a word nerd and voracious reader, resorting to the backs of cereal boxes when I was a kindergartner and had already exhausted my stack of library books. I thought my love was strictly for reading, then I started school and from the moment I first grasped one of those jumbo first-grader №2 pencils I knew writing was my jam.
And I did write for years. In grade school, I wrote stories that I lavishly illustrated with crayon drawings. As I grew older, I wrote in my diaries (natch) and started writing essays, more stories, and even dabbled in poetry. Then I just stopped. Every time I attempted to re-start, I felt so conflicted. Conflicted because I was now a responsible adult; I had a job to go to, toilets to clean, bills to pay, dogs, a husband (not necessarily in that order of priority). How could I justify spending my time writing for no reason and more importantly, for no money? For a short time, I wrote articles of the “How to Beat the Winter Blues” genre for a local free paper and it felt utterly soulless. During that stint, I felt less of a writer than I did by saying that someday when I had time, I would write again.
I wrote emails, analyses, program plans, training plans, a seeming unending plethora of dry as dust documentation designed to communicate and, in the way of such products, never really living up to that hope. I wrote research papers, literature reviews, a master’s project, and even signed up with enthusiasm to expand on my grad school work and — gasp — write a book. Less dry, more like shortbread than dust, I was writing with substance and with clarity. Then I just stopped, again. I felt less conflicted. Even though the toilets, bills, job, dogs, husband were all still there, I was comfortable with justifying time to do things that weren’t chores or paid work. No, conflict wasn’t the big barrier this time. What was holding me back was simple and seemingly unsurmountable: fear. Fear of judgment, fear of ridicule, fear of conflict; whatever you can pair “fear of” with it was probably in that list. Once fear came a-knockin’, I knew my writing game was not going to be a-rockin'. [Okay, Dorothy Parker I am not.]
Then came 2020, with its pandemic, with its upheaval, and uncertainty. I’d been on auto-pilot for quite a few years, taking few risks, comfortable with my oh so predictable life. In 2020, my auto-pilot went offline. I had to find new and different ways to simply navigate through life and without Google maps! I made really scary galvanic shifts in my life … and I not only survived, but I also began to thrive. I started re-connecting with parts of who I am that had been tucked away. So when my coach asked that classic coach question, everything in my world was primed and ready for that writer to just leap out and proclaim herself.
When I did think about writing, I always envisioned myself sitting in a sunroom typing away at my version of The Great American Novel. So I started with that image in mind and … promptly wrote myself into a corner by page 15. I hadn’t done any outlines, hadn’t planned anything, I was a writer so I figured it would just, I don’t know, come to me. As Hemingway said: “There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.” Fortunately, there was no blood on the keyboard. Unfortunately, I was feeling stuck. There was I, with time and space and inclination, and the words had simply deserted me.
Until I went to Cambridge.
Okay, I went virtually.
Okay, virtually to Cambridge’s Institute of Continuing Education (ICE).
Still Cambridge.
I might start wearing tweed and smoking a pipe.
Cambridge University’s Institute of Continuing Education (ICE) program was offering an online winter course in Short Fiction. Now, I’ll be honest, I felt short fiction might be my way of copping out. But what I’d been doing wasn’t working so I registered. What I’d forgotten about creativity was how much it loves constraints. It’s almost as if creative thought needs friction, it needs some challenge or obstacle to engage it. If you constrain or limit the parameters for creativity, well that’s when things can really get kicked into high gear. Although I initially chafed at writing creatively within the timelines and structure of the course, being constrained to create specific types of writing, or having to take someone else’s story beginning and then figure out how to end it; by the end of the first assignment, I’d re-found my flow, re-found my voice. Up until that point, I can’t think of a time outside of childhood where I’ve written as much and experienced so many moments of pure joy in my writing.
But what about the fear?
I won’t lie, I was practically hyperventilating when the due date for our first assignment arrived. Posting my writing in the virtual classroom felt like jumping off a high dive into the deep end … at night. Once it was done, though; it was done. I didn’t find myself drowning in criticism or judgment. I didn’t find myself receiving a gold medal, either. I realized, it just wasn’t the scary do-or-die, life-altering moment I’d built up in my mind. The more I wrote, the more I shared what I wrote, the more reasonable and manageable that fear became. It’s still there, it’s just gone from being something great and hulking and unfathomable to something really rather small and pretty easily handled.
Not only did the structure and constraints allow my creativity to flourish, those structures and constraints also created a space that felt safe for sharing that creativity. That learning environment restored my creative confidence, emboldening me even beyond the classroom, empowering me to say (with only a little fear and a lot of conviction), “I am a writer.”
I am a writer.
I AM a writer.
