Word on the street is that if you want to succeed in the writing business, you need to have a blog. Just ask Google for reasons why and you’ll get a litany of articles extolling the virtues of blogging. But if just having a blog was enough, then all my adolescent LiveJournal entries would’ve certainly landed me a book deal by now. (Trust me, they won’t.)
To that end, we want to try to offer useful content centered around writing and storytelling. Still fairly loose as themes go, but hopefully it will keep us from going too far off the rails. It will also be a convenient excuse to keep writing on a schedule and keep in practice, something that is not always the easiest thing to do when you are writing for yourself in a vacuum.
True to form, getting these words out into public has been a challenge. And not only because life and my day job have been extremely busy as of late. One of the common traits shared by writers, at least the ones I’ve meet, is the absolute conviction that their words are among the best ever written paired with equal surety that they are a giant fraud with nothing to say, moments away from being found out. I’m no different, and so I hovered over the “Submit” button for this post longer than I care to admit.
On the one hand, I’m sure I’m a “Writer.” I have a degree (a B.A. in Writing, not just English) and create all manner of collateral for my day job and fiction in my spare time. I have strong convictions about the Oxford comma. But on the other hand, I’ve never been published and my writing doesn’t keep my lights on. Are my words as worthy of your time as someone like The Bloggess?
What ultimately pulled me out of the spiral of self-doubt (and a fair measure of cowardice) were a few lines by Curtis Sittenfeld in her New Yorker piece, “Show Don’t Tell.” Aside from being a good overall read, the following passage really hit home:
Yes, you can say whether people have published books. But you don’t get to say whether they’re writers. Some of them are probably working on books now that they’ll eventually finish and sell; some of them probably haven’t written fiction for years and might never again. But the way they inhabit the world, the way they observe it—of course they’re writers.
How we take in the world is something L.E. and I have discussed in real life before, how it’s different than what “normal” people do, but reading Sittenfeld’s piece was the first time I’d considered it to be a core part of being a writer.
For example, one of my favorite childhood memories is being in the kitchen with my great grandmother while she cooked. My Gram would make everything from scratch, cooking for an army regardless of how many people would actually be eating. One of her specialties, a treat everyone in our family couldn’t get enough of, were her fried pies.
I remember her standing over her tiny gas range, the same one she’d been cooking on for decades, heating up Crisco lard in her largest cast iron skillet (the very same one my cousin would claim after her passing and lose in the deer woods a few years later). To her right were two sheet pans on a narrow counter. One had raw, handmade dough wrapped around apple and chocolate filling she had made the day before and the other was empty save for several layers of paper towels. Two by two she would lower the raw pies into the molten lard and it would bubble and hiss while the pies turned a marketing-perfect golden brown. After a few minutes, she would scoop out the pies with slotted metal spoon, lay them on the empty tray to drain and cool and grab two more for the frier, all the while rarely taking the Marlboro from between her lips.
The acrid cigarette smoke mixed with carnival smells of hot fat and frying dough wafting through her tiny, humid kitchen created a scent that I’ve truly never experienced anywhere else.
Everyone has memories like that, sights and sounds that bring waves of nostalgia crashing down. For me, though, there’s a secondary reaction. Like a flight or flight response from the primitive parts of our minds, my “writer’s brain” activates whenever I look back at those afternoons with Gram and says, “That’s a good smell to put in a story somewhere.”
It’s not unusual to mine memories and personal experiences for details when writing. Everything would be bland and flat otherwise. What strikes me about writer’s brain is that it’s always there, lurking behind the scenes and capturing moments. Sometimes it’s helpful, like at my grandfather’s funeral when taking a step back from the situation and grabbing details like the way the sunlight reflected brightly off of the brass handles of his coffin let me be like a photographer or documentary filmmaker; present, but separated from the immediacy of it all. Other times it’s an unwanted distraction, like capturing my exact train of thought and uncomfort levels when an old boss (by all meanings) left her lingerie shopping up on the desktop behind her during a meeting. Great fodder for future stories, but at what cost? What useful facts would have room for if I hadn’t preserved that particular “Don’t think about elephants” moment in such detail?
Helpful or not, uncomfortable or not, there’s no way to turn it off. My mind has a catalog of moments, smells, feelings and reactions at the ready, just in case they’ll be at home in a story somewhere down the line. Whether I assemble those pieces into a blog or or short story or I just keep them to myself, they wouldn’t exist if I weren’t a writer. Like Sittenfeld, I think that’s the real baseline of a writer. Whether you like it or not, you can’t stop chasing the next story.
The Barberry Writers 