November 3, 2008
Monday

What I’m finding in myself is something stronger and more incredible than anything I’ve ever known: I can do anything.
                — Susan P., b. 1983
                    American writer and adventurer

The quotation above is from twenty(or)something, a blog maintained by a young woman I met several years ago in a writers’ group. It was a new group formed to fulfill an academic writing program director’s vision of outreach and service to the community. It was supposed to be more competitive and selective than the usual book store-based drop in group, In typical fashion, it went great guns at first and then lost momentum as members, all of whom (except me) had full time jobs or young children or both, found it difficult to maintain focus. Only three of us are left, and we haven’t met since spring.

I was, I think, the oldest member of the group (I brought “an interesting demographic” to the table, I’d been told), and Susan was the youngest. She had recently graduated from college and was trying to make her way in this world, armed with a degree in English, some optimism, a not inconsiderable store of talent, and a desire to make it as a fiction writer. I liked her right away, liked the way she responded to my work (the first manuscript of mine she read happened to have a central character who was still in high school), liked the way she could turn a phrase. I was sorry when she left the group.

We’ve been in touch sporadically, but mostly I keep up with her by following her blog. Last spring she applied for a fellowship to a writers’ colony in France. She got the award, and yesterday she left, all nerves and anxiety and self-doubt.

Just like me this time last year. 

When I set out for Wyoming last year, I wasn’t concerned about the travel itself. I’m pretty good at that. In 1989, at my first summer writers’ conference, I survived a tornado that slashed through the Taft School campus in Connecticut. In 1990 a missed connection meant I was six hours behind the group I was supposed to be with, and I had to make my own way to a remote island off the coast of Scotland (a commuter flight from London to Glasgow, a train ride, a ferry across the channel, a bus across the island of Mull, and finally a small boat that you stand in to cross to Iona in the Inner Hebrides) without the chartered group arrangements I had taken for granted.

It was being alone with a blank page and all my big ideas that worried me. I was afraid I would spend the whole month editing the same page over and over, fearful of following my characters to difficult places in their hearts, reluctant to explore the shadowy corners of my own.

That didn’t happen. I thrived during the time apart. As I wrote near the end, “The page is not so frustrating and fearsome anymore. I am no longer afraid of writing the Shitty First Draft, nor am I afraid to let my characters go where they need to go. I am no longer afraid of revision, nor of long side trips down roads that might be dead ends.” I saw myself and my writing get wilder and younger and more energetic. “I am brave, independent, and capable, strong and loving and fearless,” I concluded.

The growth I achieved in Wyoming sustained me for nearly a year. I got back to work sooner and more efficiently (that is, I was making progress into undiscovered country, not just going over paved roads) than I ever had before. But in recent weeks I’ve wobbled. There’s been the U.S. election, the challenges of adjusting to the troubles in the economy, a disruption in a relationship I hold dear, and other concerns that have made it difficult to make that fall into fiction, that exiting of the real world and the dwelling in my created world, that is so important to my process.

Reading about Susan’s experience has sent me back to reviewing my own. The most recent date in my fiction work diary is October 22. That’s only two weeks ago, but I feel nearly estranged from my characters. I spent most of October preparing applications for more fellowships, including a different place in Wyoming. The results of those efforts will start arriving at the end of November. I’m giving the rest of this week to the election and the recovery from it. Lynn and I are gallivanting to New York City on Friday.

Monday morning? Back to work. Like Susan, I believe I can do anything. May both of us continue to believe this and to act on it.

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