Category: Creativity

License to Write: Part I (of 3)

12/9/2016

Adapted from a 2016 NaNoWriMo lecture at the beautiful Livermore Public Library.

If you write, you are a writer.
It doesn’t matter whether you’ve published, or just have begun to put stories together. Maybe you desperately want to write, but don’t yet have a story. Maybe you have a story to tell, but don’t yet know how. Maybe you have a story, but can’t imagine anyone else would care about it. In the next three blog posts, I hope to give you license to overcome these doubts and tools to cultivate the faith you’ll need to persevere and survive the process of writing a book.

Answer the question: Why Write?

This is a question only you can answer, a question you must answer.

I can tell you why I started: I write because I love to read. Because I love adventure, but detest risk. I write because stories allow me to inhabit lives beyond my own and connect me to people past and present. Stories make me vulnerable and grateful for my own humanity. I write because I love language, because characters announce themselves to me, because I’m good at it. I write when I’m angry, when I’m sad, when I’m baffled.

Why do you write? Why are you writing this book?

Read the rest on the Sierra Writers Conference Blog:

(Tired of 2016? Why not get a jump on 2017 by registering for the 2017 Sierra Writers' Conference and by following this blog series, curated by Joyce Wycoff. The series features writing advice from Catharine Bramkamp, Bob Jenkins, Kim Culbertson, and myself.)

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This Is Not "The End"

8/1/2012

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“You wait for the first bloom like you wait for a baby to come. Sometimes you wait four years and it opens and it isn’t what you expected, maybe your heart wants to break, but you love it. You never say, ‘that one is prettier.’ You just love them.”

Amado Vazquez speaking of raising rare orchids in Joan Didion’s The White Album

Finishing a novel feels much the same. Except that unlike an orchid or an infant, you can edit a novel! Thank God for that.

Photo: Damon Tighe

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Looking Back

12/13/2010

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Aberystwyth, Wales

When I was twenty-two, I left home to escape the things I knew and to make myself into a writer. I moved to Aberystywth, Wales, a seaside town centuries older than my own country. I woke each day to a view of the gray Irish Sea through an ancient lead-glass window, walked to work past standing stones, ate lunch in the castle ruins. I traveled London, Dublin, and Paris, stayed in hostels, collected stories and histories wherever I went. The longer I traveled, though, the more space my own home took up inside of me. It was a surprise to discover that the first story I had to tell was rooted in the history I’d left behind.

When I wasn’t traveling or working, I began to spend long afternoons in the National Library of Wales, reading about the Gold Rush, and found myself connecting with the landscape and the history I had left as I never had before. The Gold Rush was no longer a rusted Pelton wheel in my town square, or “a time in American history when…” The Gold Rush was young, hopeful, sunburned, broken-soled men and women, living far from home in tinderbox shacks with canvas walls. I recognized myself, not in their circumstances, but in their desire for adventure and reinvention, and in their grudging homesickness. I recognized the resilience and the cost of the get-rich-quick mentality I had taken for granted in California. I recognized how cycles of hope, opportunism, and failure, shape communities all over the world. History, at least recorded history, is built on wins and losses, booms and busts.

Then, one day in a reading room the size of a high school gymnasium, I discovered a photograph of an androgynous young man, or a woman dressed as a boy, glaring from the pages of Susan Lee Johnson’s Roaring Camp. An oversized panama hat shaded haunted eyes; a stained flannel draped from narrow shoulders; the gun cinched to her waist with a belt looked more like a prop than a threat. As I looked at that photograph, my obsession with the history became a story.

What if, I wondered. What if a stranger came to town… What if a young woman dressed as a boy on the run from the law…

Then I needed a town for my stranger, for Alex, and a rag-tag supporting cast of men with constitutions sturdy enough and personalities large enough to survive the labors their dreams demanded of them. Soon Emaline and the Victoria Inn emerged as the center of the town, a reason, beyond survival, luck and riches, for a community, for a story, and for a writer to grow.

Funny to think I left California to become a writer. The first story I had to tell brought me back again.

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License to Write: Part I (of 3)

This Is Not "The End"

Looking Back

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