Me and the Gals: Two Essential Guides to Writing

I have a secret family.

As a child I would sneak over to their house and spy into their yard, envious of their elegant red brick Victorian house, bulging at the seams with activity. There were eight children, all lively, warm and clever. They invented new ways to slide down the oak banister and made it a game to sneak muffins out of the kitchen before the cook caught them. Yes, they could afford a cook as well as several horses. The father, who appeared at the front door from the bank every evening promptly at 6 o'clock did well to provide for his family. The mother, everyone's favorite, was always in some other room, busy with what, I don't know.

I wanted so desperately to enter their home and take part in the endless excitement. I wanted to know what the mother was doing in that other room. Sadly I never was able to. I never finished the story.

The family in the “Victorian House”, the stately title of my first novel has been a part of me since I began it at eleven. Unlike the imaginary family (whose name alludes me now; I want to say Allen?) there really was a beautiful Victorian house in my neighborhood that I liked to stare at from my bike and imagine what that (make-believe) family of mine was up to.

I wrote twenty pages of the book and then the story alluded me. I can't remember why. Perhaps I got sidetracked with another story or puberty but that family has never left me and the pinning to know what the mother was doing in that room leads me to believe I will finish their story someday.

I've always known I wanted to be a writer. Other various careers held my fancy growing up, depending on the stage of my life: an Olympic track athlete, an actress and for a brief time, storm chaser. But being a writer was always set in stone, sealed in my heart.

I'm just that way. I have always known myself very well. I hate to border on boasting but its true and I know how fortunate I am to have this ability. I didn't try out various personas in junior high like so many of my classmates. I never needed a boyfriend or straight A's to define myself. I just knew who I was and accepted that, warts and all.

The blessing of knowing yourself allows you to know what you want. It takes me twenty minutes to clothes shop. When I shop with my husband, I'm the one looking at my watch. When I first met my husband it was only a few weeks before I told my mom, “I think this guy is the one for me.” We hadn't even begun dating yet!

Knowing is one thing, doing, quite another. As I have begun my journey to become a serious writer I find myself on less sure ground. There is so much to know about writing that its sometimes hard to even begin. Then there is the unknown world of publication, that seemingly insurmountable task of getting a book agent, a publisher, an editor. These are heady waters that I am treading in right now.

That's why I was so happy to have found two books that have become my essential guides to writing. These books were stacked in my pile of summer reads but are now permanent fixtures on my bedside table.

Madeline L'Engle, author of A Wrinkle in Time, journals about the writing process, faith and motherhood in A Circle of Quiet. I can't imagine there being a more relevant book for me as those three things are of paramount importance to me. With humor, humility and openness she challenges herself and the reader to dig deeper into humanity and by doing so, into oneself.

Some Gems From A Circle of Quiet:

- “So the challenge I face with children is the redemption of adulthood. We must make it evident that maturity is the fulfilling of childhood and adolescence, not a diminishing; that it is an affirmation of life, not a denial; that it is entering fully into our essential selves.”

- “My seminar students ask me, 'But isn't it better not to make the promises at all? Isn't it more honest?' I shook my head. 'No. I don't think so. And I do have a right to talk you about this, because I've been married to the same man for almost twenty-five years...When we were married we made promises and we took them seriously. No relationship between two people which is worth anything is static...There've been a number of times in my marriage when-if I hadn't made promises-I'd have quit...I'm quite sure that Hugh and I would never have reached the relationship we have today if we hadn't made promises.'”

- “Is the impulse to write, to work out one's unhappiness in work, neurotic? I couldn't care less.”

- “All real art is, in its true sense, religious; it is a religious impulse; there is no such thing as a non-religious subject.”

- “I have to use what intellect I have in order to write books but I write the kind of books I do in order that I may try to set down glimpses of things that are on the other side of the intellect...If we are given minds we are required to use them but not limit ourselves by them.”

- “To be fifty-one in the world of today and to be able to say, 'I am a happy person,' may seem irresponsible. But it is not. It is what keeps me capable of making a response. I do not understand it, or need to. Meanwhile, I am grateful.”

- “Creativity is an act of discovering.”

- “And joy is always a promise.”

- “Some of the greatest writing mankind has ever produced comes in the caesura; the pause between words.”

- “Nothing important is completely explicable.”

The other game changer is Virginia Woolf's journal, known simply as A Writer's Diary. Any writer will sympathize and be comforted as they read over her struggles and triumphs with writing. The day to day life of a writer, the highs and lows (I'm a genius! I'm an idiot!) are surprisingly and comfortingly common and it brings so much solace to know I am not alone in the struggle. Writing is no ditch-digging but it does require hard work. Woolf's fight with depression and mental illness will be recognizable to those who also struggle with it.

Some Gems From A Writer's Diary:

- “I respect myself for writing this book-yes-even though it exhibits my congenital faults.”

- “I believe these illnesses are in my case-how shall I express it?-partly mystical. Something happens in my mind. It refuses to go on registering impressions. It shuts itself up. It becomes a chrysalis.”

- “I fill in this page, nefariously; at the end of a morning's work. I have begun the second part of Waves- I don't know. I don't know.

- “To begin reading with a pen in my hand, discovering, pouncing, thinking of phrases, when the ground is new, remains one of my great excitements.”

- “Returning health: This is shown by the power to make images; the suggestive power of every sight and word is enormously increased. Shakespeare must have had this to an extant which makes my normal state the state of a person blind, deaf, dumb, stone-stockish and fish-blooded.”

- “I have not yet mastered the speaking voice. Yet I think there is something there.”

There you have it. Two books and two women that have and will continue to influence me as I continue my journey in the wild and wonderful world of writing.

Happy Reading!

---