First, a word about this blog.  True confession:  I don’t really know what I want this to be.  I don’t have a plan. That’s also, for anyone who’s interested, how I write stories  I have no plan.  I know almost nothing when I sit down to write.  Maybe a character.  Maybe a small fact about human nature.  That’s all.  I describe the process as walking through a dark wood, looking for lights to guide me.  I imagine writing this blog will be a bit like that for me.  I hope that as it meanders along, maybe even as it finds a more regular form, you who join me here, will find it interesting and maybe – this is my really my highest hope for these words – it will be a good companion to you as you write and also as you read.

So, in the spirit of having no plan, I’ll just start by saying that I woke up this morning thinking about the fact that I’ve never kept a diary.

Over the years – which in my case means over more than four decades – I’ve tried to keep diaries (or as they seem to be called now ‘journals’) from time to time.  And it hardly makes me unique that I’ve failed.  I know plenty of people who have failed at journal keeping ,often because after an enthusiastic, dedicated start, they lose steam somewhere around week three, maybe during a particularly dull period of their life (‘ate dinner again tonight, watched tv. . .’) or possibly when they figure out that to be honest means painting a less than flattering self-portrait (‘Kicked the neighbor’s dog again. . .feel bad about it, but couldn’t stop myself’)   But that was never me – I mean I never got far enough to be either dull or despicable.  I always ground out at sentence one.

“So,” I would begin, “I’ve decided to keep a diary.”  Or I’d skip the statement of the obvious, the meta-moment, and jump straight to the headline, something like, “Today at school I threw up” or”I am in love for the first time in my life.  I mean REALLY in love”  (These are both from my middle-school oeuvre).  But that was pretty much it.  Because the question of to whom I was speaking always bothered me.   The basic premise seemed to be that I was talking to myself.   But I didn’t exactly believe that.  I couldn’t quite let go of other possibilities.  Like the possibility of discovery.  Someone would find the thing and would learn all my secrets.  My brother.  My Enemies – an ever shifting group of adolescent girls who, like me, managed their painful self-consciousness by critically dissecting one another.   The second danger was that My Biographers, that august group whom I assumed would not be interested in my writing as such, but in my life as the glamorous star of stage and screen I then imagined I would one day become, would pore over the pages looking for evidence of my magical magnetism.  And I just couldn’t bear the idea that I would seem average, typical.  Dull.  Which even I could tell I was.  No matter how I tried, I couldn’t seem to manufacture any magnificence  of any kind – not unless I lied, which meant it wasn’t really a diary anymore, was it?  So by the time I had realized that I couldn’t tell the truth lest it be read by those who would use it against me nor do a convincing job painting myself as goddess-like – at the age of say, thirteen – I no longer understood the point of the exercise at all.

The thing that never occurred to me then was that the act of writing might, at times, be something completely separate from the act of being read.

I think about this often now, about those pages I never filled, each time I am asked “When you write fiction, do you have a particular reader in your head or do you write for yourself?”    (As an aside I’ll just say that I never tire of questions like this one and “How do you get your ideas?” and ‘Do you know the whole story when you start.”   I don’t tire of being asked or of reading about other writers being asked, because every single writer has a different answer; and also because I am always reminded of what a luxury, what a gift it is to do work in which other people are so interested.  Yes, I suppose it can be tiresome answering the same question over and over and over, but imagine how much more tiresome it would be if no one cared about the work you do!)

I never did take to journal keeping but gradually, in stages, I stopped worrying at all about who might be reading what I write.  The first shift came when I began to write fiction in college, and the issue of what people might find out about me disappeared.  Or so I naively thought. I now believe that fiction is in many ways more revealing than is memoir, fiction being a bit like dreams we show the world, but back then I believed I had hidden myself.  So all that obsessed me about my work in those days was: IS IT GOOD?????  (And it was definitely an all-caps kind of concern.)  And all that I thought it might reveal about me (and desperately wanted it to reveal about me) was: I”M A GOOD WRITER! (RIGHT?? RIGHT??)  And while that concern didn’t wholly silence me the way my worries about self-revelation had, it certainly shut me down in other ways.  It made me careful.  It made me tight and ungenerous with my words.  It made me cautious – and, as I have learned the hard way, caution is one of the most effective enemies to good work.

After my college years, I wrote off and on for nearly two decades and throughout that long stretch, as I had three children, one unhappy marriage, one far happier one, dealt with some terrible losses, absorbed the facts of a child’s special needs, struggled with bouts of depression and crippling anxiety, something odd happened to my impulse to write.  It stopped being about who would read it.  It stopped being about being good – or bad.  Revealing or a veil over the real me.  It stopped being much of anything other than the means through which I tried and tried and tried again to make sense of  life.  I wrote because writing made me feel more in control – not of the writing, but of the moments passing me by.  And I wrote because through an odd and gorgeous alchemy writing helps me be the best version of myself I can be.  Not that I become wonderful or – lord knows – perfect, or anything like that.  I just become a better me – flaws and all.

I’m pretty sure now, decades after the fact, that at least some of those friends of mine whose shelves or attics or memories are filled with rows of journals in which they scribbled daily what had happened to them and what they had thought at the time, weren’t concerned with who else might see what they wrote.  I’m pretty sure that they had already intuited, long, long, long before I did, the way in which words with their particular dynamic of specificity of meaning and infinity of the same, can help us live better lives.

Hmmmm.  I wonder if all this is on my mind because in just under two months my first book comes out and I find myself  – inevitably, I would think – newly obsessed with what people will think of my work. . . Food for thought.  Fodder, maybe, for another post.

More to come. . .I very much hope you’ll come back and discover along with me where this blog is going to go. . .(now, what does that mean about writing for others and writing for oneself?)