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Why You Should Be Writing
The Writing Life · The Writing Process

Why You Should Be Writing

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This past weekend my husband and I spent the day in St. Petersburg. We had lunch at this really cool restaurant called The Library, which by the way was built by his company. We toured another one of his projects under construction, before heading to the Chihuly Museum.

To say the glass was breathtaking would be an understatement, but what I hadn’t expected was the words of wisdom Dale Chihuly shared in the film about his work. 

One section of the film focused on the creation of the Chihuly Light of Jerusalem 2000 at the Tower of David Museum. Chihuly made a comment about how much the world needed art and how he hoped the exhibit might play a part in bringing Jews and Arabs together. Chihuly believed art had that kind of power. It made me think about writing. 

Our stories can help heal the world, but only if we actually write them.  

Remember the courage, inspiration, comfort, and healing you received from a book. What if the author allowed fear, procrastination, or a myriad of other excuses to stop her from sitting down and writing her book done? 

There are so many reasons not to write, but you and I both know they’re just fear and doubt dressed in fancy clothes. See them for what they are and write anyway.

Want to know why? 

It’s what you want to do. 

You love the power of words. You play with ideas in your head. You scribble in your journal. You feel the magic of pen to paper — clicking of keys. You know there’s something inside dying to come out. Don’t stop it. Write.

Writing gives us space to reflect. It helps clears the foggy. We can express things we couldn’t or wouldn’t say out loud. It allows us to the opportunity to look beneath the surface at who we are and what we really feel. We can be neurotic, obsessive, and plain old weird without risk of judgment. Well, you might judge yourself. I’ve looked back at some of my old journals and been like, girl you need to burn that shit. But more often than not, those pages reflect the course of my own healing. Writing has taught me how to be more compassionate with myself and others. 

This happened to me while I was working on a novella about my paternal grandparents for my graduate thesis. My faculty advisor pointed out that the character modeled after my great-grandfather was flat. He challenged me to really look into him as a person.

To be honest, I couldn’t imagine seeing him as anything more than the abusive, mean man that I had always heard about. He never said much to me as a young girl, but my grandmother told me many stories about the vicious way he would beat her mother. But as I began to write more about him, I tried looking at the world through his eyes. I began to see the way life in rural Mississippi beat him down as a black man. That wasn’t an excuse for him to beat my great grandmother, but it let me see where his anger may have come from. For the first time, I began to feel some compassion for him. 

You owe it to yourself to see where your writing will go.

We all have ideas and solutions in our head that just sit there. Television and technology sometimes make us lazy. We allow ourselves to be entertained rather than to create, explore, or invent. 

That book or movie which was just like an idea you had is a cautionary tale of exactly why you should be writing. You sat on it. The other person took a chance. Stop thinking about it. Start writing.

In the words of every Nike commercial you’ve ever seen — just do it.

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

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The struggle is real.

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Yesterday, while going through the bookshelves in my office, I came across a Mediations For WOMEN Who Do Too Much Journal.

It was one of those journals that places a word and a quote prompt on the top of each page. There didn’t seem to be any reason to keep it since I’d only written on the first five pages. I pitched it in the recycling bin, but then thought that I should at least read what I wrote.

The first entry was dated December 20, 1994, over twenty years ago. The word struggle was matched with the following quote by Oriana Fallaci:

You wear yourself out in the pursuit of wealth or love or freedom, you do everything to gain some right, and once it’s gained, you take no pleasure in it.

I was curious about what my twenty-nine year old self thought was a struggle. I fully expected to be amused. But what I wrote sounded eerily familiar.

I am in the midst of struggle. I’m struggling with my career. Where do I go? What do I do? I seem to be entrenched in the struggle. My life is passing me by.

Though older, and presumably wiser, I can relate to the sentiments of my younger self. Since 1994, I have struggled with my career. In fact, if you were sitting here next to me and we were talking, I would have used air quotes around the words my career.

For the majority of my adult life I have sat on the proverbial fence between motherhood and my career. Though part of me wanted to be a stay-at-home mom, I seemed to intuitively know that I wouldn’t be completely happy in the role. Early in my marriage, I didn’t have much of a choice. I needed to work. However, by the time my daughter was born, my husband had advanced in his career to the point that I was able to stay home. But to be honest after a year at home with three young children, I was more than a little ready to go back to work.

I held professional, salaried positions, but family remained my number one priority. My job had to be flexible. It helped that for the first ten years of my work-life every supervisor I had was a divorced single mother. But it’s difficult to build a career around flexibility. And as a result, I never felt that did either thing well.

I struggled. And I’m still struggling.

I still haven’t learned how to balance family with the pursuit of my career. I often wonder if that is even possible. But as I start to embrace the reality of being an empty-nester, I realize I have to let go of the striving and be who I am. Sometimes that means saying no to my family. Sometimes that means saying no to one professional pursuit.

At the bottom of the journal, there was a few words of encouragement written by Anne Wilson Schaef, the author of Meditations for WOMEN who do too much. It said:

Sometimes we have to struggle –– sometimes not. The issue is not the romance of the struggle. The issue is who we are as we engage in it.

My journal entry that day ended by questioning whether or not I enjoyed struggling. Looking back, I think a part of me did. But now, I truly understand there is no romance in the struggle. The real allure should be who we become as a result.

I decided to keep the journal. And in other twenty years I can read it along with this blog post. 

Until next time. . .