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  I’ve seen the most talented writers teeter on this precipice. Mentors help. Writing groups hold the space. Getting feedback holds us steady. But ultimately, if you don’t finally own in your heart that you can do this, you won’t. The conviction might trickle in incrementally, like drops of rain filling a well, with small wins and hard work. It might show up as a sunflower of clarity in your heart that one day just bursts into its bright yellow self. It doesn’t matter how it comes, but it must come from deep within you.

  Just as some of the most glamorous celebrities who seemingly have it all never feel beautiful, rich, or happy enough, so the external trappings of success as a writer will never turn on that switch of self-belief.

  Conviction—trust in yourself—is about grabbing hold of the reins of clarity and riding like hell toward your goal.

  45

  Stop waiting

  We all imagine that now is not the right time. We’re busy. We’re working. We’ve got little kids. We’re not inspired. But someday, we think, the right circumstances will arrive like a long-awaited parcel in the post. The stars will align. The Age of Aquarius will dawn.

  This illusion is catastrophic.

  Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield said, “The problem is, you think you have time.” We don’t. Now is the right time. It’s the only time.

  This craziness spills into our expectations once we’ve finished writing too. We search for an agent. We submit our manuscripts to 1,000 publishers. And we wait. To be picked. To be ordained as worthy. For recognition. For a contract. To be chosen. For our books to become bestsellers.

  Here are the hard, cold facts about the publishing industry today: No one is coming to save you (or me, for that matter). No literary agent or publisher is waiting for us to write that bestseller. Even if we get “picked,” they are not responsible for our success.

  We are.

  So stop waiting. A. Lee Martinez wrote, “Those who write are writers. Those who wait are waiters.”

  Whatever you’re waiting for doesn’t exist.

  Write now.

  46

  Only connect

  Why does our writing fail sometimes?

  We fail when we try too hard.

  We bomb when we try to copy others.

  We miss the mark when our writing is not aligned with who we are.

  We write vaguely when we don’t really know what we have to say.

  We fail when we shrink back from the deepest self-knowledge we are capable of reaching.

  The way to connect with our writing voice, ourselves, and our readers is through an intimacy with our felt experience.

  To be successful as a writer, we must be good connectors.

  We must be connected to our own emotional truths and our authentic writing voice.

  47

  Stepping into something larger than you

  Saying YES doesn’t mean that you’re not shitting yourself. It doesn’t mean you know everything’s going to be okay. It’s an invitation to the universe to meet you in a bigger vision of who you know you can be.

  We trust ourselves when we step into something that is larger than ourselves—when we act even before we’re ready, or when we don’t quite know what we’re doing. It’s about taking an action that feels so scary, radical, so much bigger than we think we can fit into, but we believe we’ll grow into it, goddamn it. It’s Goethe’s “boldness”—a cheeky (not delusional, mind you) invocation of a huge energetic container that we must now fill. First we must create our vision, then we must take powerful action to step into that vision. As John Burroughs said, “Leap and the net will appear.”

  Ten years ago I was in partnership with a wonderful woman. We started a small business writing books for companies. Our time was spent writing proposals and pitching books on relationships for dating sites, and on how to build your own kitchen for hardware stores. I was decomposing inside. These were not the books I was born to write.

  But we were making a modest income and we had several projects lined up. All I wanted was to write my new novel. I was terrified to break the partnership, but I did.

  “You’re crazy,” she told me. “We’ve got a good business here.”

  I didn’t care about the business. I cared about my writing.

  “I want to see if I can make it on my own as an author.”

  She shrugged and gave me that look we give someone when we know they’re about to make the biggest mistake of their life.

  Her words played into all my deepest fears—of failing, of not making it, of giving up on a sure thing to pursue some ridiculous fantasy of being an author.

  I even told her she could keep my share of the business. I wanted a clean start. I needed an uncluttered vision of my future.

  The German poet Rilke said, “The future enters us . . . long before it happens.”

  And I leaped.

  48

  What do you stand for?

  When I was a law lecturer, I once got into a fierce argument with a student while we were discussing rape law. I said it would be a struggle for me to defend a person accused in a rape case (not that sometimes people aren’t wrongly accused; it happens—rarely, but it does happen). He reproached me for not being objective. I went away and mulled over our interaction. Was I a flawed legal thinker because of my bias toward rape survivors?

  I penned him a long letter in which I wrote that we all have to make choices about who we are and what we stand for in life. We need to draw lines: this is who I am and these are my values. For a lawyer, one of those lines is: Do I become a prosecutor for the state or do I defend accused people? Do I go into criminal law or corporate law? Do I defend rapists or do I work with rape survivors?

  I explained that of course someone accused of rape deserved the best defense lawyer. But that person wasn’t going to be me. Why? Because I wouldn’t make myself available in that way. The accused has the right to a lawyer, but he can’t have me.

  Similarly, I decided early on that I didn’t want to be an English professor or a literary critic, because I didn’t want to be critiquing work, I wanted to be on the side of creation.

  As writers we need this kind of conviction. Not just believing up front in our ability to write, but keeping our belief going. It is no good to be endlessly doubting our story or our ability to tell it. Writers have to be able to make countless decisions—about what to include and not to include, whether and how to write about real people, which word best describes what they’re saying, and how to excise whatever is not serving the story. Wishy-washy doesn’t cut it. A writer must be able to act with the decisiveness of a surgeon.

  In my book Things without a Name, I named all the characters after real people who had died in incidents of domestic or sexual violence. At the end of the book there was an appendix in which I told each person’s story in a few lines.

  My publisher wanted me to drop the appendix. She said it might “make readers uncomfortable,” and that “it wasn’t appropriate in a work of fiction.”

  I didn’t want to piss my publisher off. But this was so important to me that I refused to budge, and I knew if she refused to publish the book with the appendix, I’d be willing to walk away.

  A few years later, when my editor returned the manuscript of my book When Hungry, Eat, she recommended cutting out the humor in certain places because she felt it undermined the more serious moments.

  “That humor is part of my writing voice,” I told her. Still, I went through the manuscript and sweated over each of her suggestions before rejecting most of them. I knew what the feel of the book should be, and humor was at the heart of it. Her vision for the book was simply different from mine. If I hadn’t trusted myself, I might have let her talk me out of my own writing voice.

  Writers cannot be pushovers. But we must be flexible at the same time. We must pick our battles and work out which ones matter and which ones we’re prepared to let go. Above all, we must not be precious about our writing. But we must be able to distinguish
between what matters and what doesn’t. This takes practice.

  49

  Take yourself seriously

  When you’re 18 and you say that you want to be a writer, people respond, “Get a real job.” Because you think adults know how life should be lived, you go to law school because that’s a good career for a smart woman.

  But you stay up all night writing stories. You lie in bed on weekends reading like you’re book-malnourished (though law school nearly destroys your love of reading).

  You get into an Ivy League university. You go off to do a master’s in law, and now you have two law degrees. But one day you wake up in a sweat because if there’s one thing you’re clear about, it’s that you really don’t want to be a lawyer.

  You make friends with a journalist and confess to her one night after too much red wine that you want to be a writer (*said whisperingly*). She sends you an application form for a writers’ colony, a place where you can go and write for weeks on end and be bothered by no one and, in fact, have people cook your meals. That application stays pinned to your bulletin board for a year. Every time you look at it, you brush the thought away and go back to marking first-year law essays on the fundamentals of contract law. Sometimes when you’re alone you say out loud, “I want to be an author.” Shameful stuff like that. You keep these dirty thoughts to yourself. You keep writing late into the night.

  One day after getting into a fight with a law student over the mark you gave him, you pull that form down and fill it in as if you were applying for an organ transplant.

  Then you think, I might as well apply for a few more.

  Even waiting for the rejections feels more hopeful than not having done anything at all. As if you’ve opened a window you were told never to try to open and now you can finally breathe.

  The first rejection letter arrives. You finger the letter and, though it hurts, you know that someone out there actually read your stuff. But then another letter arrives and it’s fatter than the first one. Fat is good, you think.

  And it is. Because you’ve been offered an eight-week residency at that writers’ colony.

  Suddenly a wind sweeps in through that open window and you cradle your head and kiss the letter because here it is: the moment that changes everything.

  * * *

  I was offered places at three of the writers’ colonies I applied to. I chose Hedgebrook and spent eight weeks of a Seattle autumn in Cedar cottage, where I wrote the first draft of my debut novel, The Dreamcloth.

  I don’t know how destiny works, but I know I curved the arc of my life that day when my longing to write out-muscled my fear that I couldn’t.

  When I took that application form down and applied myself to the task of answering hard questions about why I wanted to write and what I wanted to write about, I was saying YES to the part of me that longed to be a writer. We can’t ask others to take us seriously until we’ve taken ourselves seriously. It starts with us.

  But taking yourself seriously means taking risks. Getting squirmily uncomfortable. Doing stuff you’d never, ever normally do. Like strip naked in public—at least that’s how it feels when you enter short story competitions and send your writing into the world looking for a publisher.

  This is where conviction and courage lock arms and we leap to the next level.

  There’s only one way to test the strength of your conviction that you want to write—and that’s by putting yourself out there, getting rejected, regrouping, trying again and again and again and again, until something gives.

  Like Olivia, one of the writers I mentor who, in sheer terror, sent off her short story to a competition . . . and won. Her story was then produced and performed on national radio. Then an exquisite piece she wrote for Mother’s Day was published and she was asked to read it on national radio. She has now finished the first draft of her book.

  And Elana, another writer I mentor, who has just had her 22nd article published—and successfully negotiated a higher per-word rate than she was first offered. Because she now understands the value of her own writing.

  And Kerry, who has been on several writing retreats with me, who won a poetry competition and had her second story shortlisted in a regional short story competition.

  Treat yourself with dignity and respect. Call yourself a freelance writer. Think and behave like someone who is serious about what she’s doing.

  50

  Trust what you love

  Given that we’re all born into a language that seeps into us by some magical neurological osmosis, perhaps we’re prone, in that peculiarly human way, to take for granted what we already possess. We have words. Having them, we don’t think to love them. We’re a species notorious for needing tragedy to illuminate our appreciation of what we already have, be it health, companionship, the most ordinary of happinesses. I, for one, am perfectly clear that I do not need to have a stroke wipe out my facility for the English language to be reminded of how much I love words.

  In my early teens my father, perhaps finally wearied by my prolific poetic offerings and towers of teetering adjectives, gave me a copy of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood: A Play for Voices.

  I remember a sensation tingling through my body as I read the opening paragraph:

  To begin at the beginning: It is Spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched courters’-and-rabbits’ wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea. The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine to-night in the snouting velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows’ weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now.

  The words were chocolates in my mouth. I could taste the phrase “the clip clop of horses on the sunhoneyed cobbles of the humming streets” on my tongue. A champagne of verbal bubbles.

  As a child I watched circus trapeze artists with bewildered fascination. I never once thought, I wish I could do that. Some people do. They go on to become wonderful circus trapeze artists and to travel the world in caravans, or, in this day and age, probably in airplanes. But when I read Dylan Thomas, I thought to myself, I wish I could do that. If you are one of those who make this silent wish, you’ve got what it takes to become a writer, even if you’ve never written a single word.

  We can use words to say “get lost,” “whatever,” “all right,” “that’s nice,” but . . . we can also dip into language and use words that uplift and inspire. If you are one of those people who want to create magic with words, you, honey, are a writer.

  I studied linguistics in my first year at university, and I vaguely recall decoding sentences to reveal deeply embedded structures, layers upon layers of parts of speech, quite algebraic and formulaic. Until then I never knew how innate composition is to language comprehension, and how invisibly interwoven structure is to meaning. It seemed like inheriting a genetic disposition for, say, classical music or drawing when others need years to learn the art. The talent is bundled into us, complete, awaiting discovery.

  Words dance in our brains in a place that connects imagination and language, a secret place we don’t even know we’re partying in.

  How can we not love words?

  How then can we not trust what we love?

  51

  Trust your judgment

  We live in a culture that makes us endlessly doubt our ability to make good decisions—about what to eat, who to love, what we think of our bodies, and how to be happy. Parents have so lost touch with their intuition that we read book after book on how to be decent parents, because of course we wouldn’t know how to do it by ourselves.

  Dr. Benjamin Spock’s Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, first published in 1946, marked a break from the strict routines and discipline advocated by behaviorists who tended to enfeeble parents by labeling them ignorant. The opening lines of his book were simp
ly, “Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.”

  I struggle to even follow a recipe because I don’t like being told what to do. I trust my instincts, my judgments, and that if I make a mistake, at least I’ll learn something about myself.

  So I find it bewildering when aspiring writers ask me, “What do you think I should write about?” I don’t have the answer to anyone’s longing. If we don’t trust ourselves, we will never be able to take the risks and make the decisions we need to as authors.

  No one else has the right answers to the questions in your heart.

  Let yourself be the judge.

  Choose.

  Then live by your choice.

  52

  Trust the urgency

  I wanted to be a mother from the age of four.

  So in my late twenties, when I was a law lecturer, I befriended a guy called Zed who had the office next to mine. After two years, our friendship sidled into the romance zone.

  And a month into our relationship I told him, “I want a baby next year. Are you in or are you out?” I come from a line of dodgy uteruses, and my ovaries were all lined up and ready to go.

  He choked on his beer and stammered, “I . . . I don’t know if I want children.”

  “I get it,” I said. “Kids aren’t for everyone. But I’m twenty-eight and I want a baby before I’m thirty.”

  I gave him a few weeks to think about it.

  A year later our daughter was born, and two years after that, our son. We’ve now been together for 20 years.

  When I recount this story—mostly, it seems, while I’m having my hair done by young hairdressers who are being jerked around by commitment-phobic men—they gasp at my audacity. “My boyfriend would run a million miles. How come yours didn’t?”