[As a little digression here, just a few words about the whole "can you really teach people how to write?" thing.  My own philosophy on this is that it's the wrong question.  The question I prefer to ask and have answered for myself - in the affirmative - is can you help people better understand why they want to write and how they might best help themselves reach those goals?  How can you make the process - inevitably tortuous as it is for us all at times - as valuable and as meaningful and as satisfying for that individual as possible?  I don't worry about teaching people how to be good writers or publishable writers - I worry, quite a lot as it happens - about helping people who want to write, love to write.  And in my experience the more they love doing it, the better they are at it.  And the better they become, the more they love doing it.  And the more they love doing it, the more easily and eagerly they can absorb the technical, craft aspects that will help them become even more pleased with the results.   Maybe that's a somewhat specious way of dodging the question, but it keeps me on track.]

So, there I was yesterday with this room full of students, early days in the semester and we’re all adjusting to one another – in what feel like productive ways.   I’m using some new workshopping methods that seem to be valuable.  No one is even close to having fallen asleep.  Or burst into tears.  And then at the very end I hear myself saying to them:  “I just want to tell you that if you’re going to do this, if you’re going to write, don’t just write.  Don’t just fiddle around in it.  Try to be a great writer.  Think about the writers who have moved you,the ones who have made you want to do this, and aim to be in their company.  Don’t take every word you produce too seriously, but take the power of words seriously, always.  Take the potential to be powerful seriously, that potential in each of you.  Write to reach that potential.”

Or something like that.

I’m cringing a bit now writing this, as I cringed right after class.  Because what on earth did I mean? I, who am the champion of people letting themselves play on their pages. (“Stories are like mud pies!” I tell students.  “Keep mucking around in them!  Don’t take yourself so seriously”).  I, who advise every student I have to tape a card over their computer saying:  “No one ever has to read a single word I write” – just exactly to banish the pressure to be Great.  (What does it even mean: GREAT??  I hate the very word.)

This bothered me all afternoon.  And during the night.  Ugh.  But what I woke up thinking today is that by “great” I didn’t mean some overblown version of “good” – though I’m afraid it may have sounded that way to them.   I didn’t mean, when you sit down at the keyboard, make sure you try to write well, make sure it’s  Really Well-Written – because that’s precisely the point of the card taped above the screen.  To free them, to free me, from the impulse to try to be a Good Writer.  To remember that you can write anything AT ALL and hide it away.  Hit delete.  Print it and shred it.  So yes, play in those mud pies.  Do things that seem outrageous.  Embarrassing.  That seem downright bad.

The thing is, of course, that words are damned tricky things.  We writers depend on their slippery nature.  I mentioned that in my first post – the way that the meaning of a word is both seductively specific – yes, that’s precisely it! I pinned that baby down! – and at the same time also infinite.  Therein lies their glory – and their potential for all manner of  betrayal.

So, yes, of course, by “great,” I didn’t mean “really good.”  I meant something completely different from that.  I meant write what only you can write.  Write what matters to you.  Write about those things, from those angles that deep in your private self you believe are yours alone – your views, your understandings, your sense of what is important about this life thing we have been handed, its finite nature, our capacities for love and cruelty and recovery; and the times when those capacities let us down. Or whatever it is that matters to you.

No wonder they looked at me like I was a little bit nuts.  (I imagine them in their dining hall:  “we have this wacky writing teacher . . .She’s a little too. . intense. . “)   I was talking to them in that class – I swear I was.  But of course I was also  – really, I suppose -  talking to myself.  Which is arguably not an ideal thing to do in a class.  But it’s early days in the semester.  There’s time to catch that impulse in myself.

Maybe every blog post I write for a while is going to circle around to the fact that I’m sitting here, 47 years old, waiting for my first book to come out.  And, for better and worse, it’s a book in which I did what I am advising them to do.  I wrote about what I think matters.  I wrote – oh, what hubris we writers we need to have and eventually to own up to having! – from the angle I think of as mine alone.  I said what I believe no one else can say.  Told ten stories I believe I alone can tell.  And while I cannot possibly judge the quality of the work, and stopped trying to do some time ago, I know how very honest a book it is.  How very exposing.  I know the exact moment at which I decided to allow my truest self to be there, in those words.  I know it is a book, that though fictional, entirely so, carries inside it,  my infant self, my childhood, my young womanhood, my early years of parenting, my current years, these years in which I can’t help but understand that years are finite things.  All  of me.  There I am.  288 pages worth.   And it is scary as hell.

Yet I know as I sit here, excited, anxious, relieved and also numb at times, waiting for its arrival, the one thing I don’t regret, won’t ever regret, is having put it all in there, having gone for broke.  And that’s what I wanted them to know.

Can you know that at 18 and 19?   Even 21?

Note to self: on Thursday, in class, maybe clarify a little bit:  Um, so when I said that about going for greatness. . .don’t go for greatness.  That’s not really what I meant.  But if you’re going to write, if you really want to do this, for heaven’s sake, for your own, and for ours, please throw caution to the wind.

Maybe they’ll still think I’m a little nutty, a little intense about all this.  I suppose I am. Especially during these waiting days.  But maybe they’ll remember that advice one day and be glad for it.

Even teaching presents us opportunities to revise, it seems.  And thank goodness for that.

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?)