This is what we do.

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Last week I spoke at the CATE/GSDCTE* Student Creative Writing Awards ceremony. Three winning students in six grade divisions, beginning with grades 5-6 and through grades 11-12, were invited to read their winning entries, receive their certificates, and be applauded and congratulated by their English teachers, their proud parents, and members of the sponsoring organizations.

The very next morning, I drove to the other side of LA to talk at the monthly meeting of the San Fernando Valley chapter of the California Writers Club. Here, writers closer to my own age (and we all know how old that is), gather on the first Saturday of the month to share their work, celebrate their “wins” and hear a presentation.

The juxtaposition of these two events bringing writers together to talk about writing and to read their work struck me as something really wonderful. On Friday afternoon, writers as young as eleven stood before a microphone, held their work in their hands, and read to us. Not twenty-four hours later, writers six and seven decades older (one woman did confess to me of being eighty), repeated the ritual—the microphone, the pages, the work.

This is what we do, we writers. We start and we just keep going. Age doesn’t matter; what matters is persistence, dedication, commitment, patience and stamina! We don’t run out of words—with all the words available to us in the English language (something upwards of 800,000), it’s just a matter of how we arrange them. We maintain our curiosity, we lead with our imagination, and we do the work. I once said all I needed was an unending roll of white paper to be pulled beneath my pen, and wouldn’t it be nice to have, as Rudyard Kipling once kept at his father’s house, “an ink-boy to grind me Indian-ink.”

This week, on Friday evening at DimeStories, along with a couple dozen other writers, I stood before a microphone, held my work in my hands, and read. The next day, I sat at a table in a cafe, opened my notebook and wrote more pages. It’s what we do and what we’ll keep doing until they make us stop.

Not every writer will read their work into the microphone before an audience, and not every writer will begin at age eight, as I did. Not every writer will continue into their seventh or eighth decade, but we can. Curiosity. Imagination. Commitment. Persistence. Stamina. And words—take your pick, you’ve got hundreds of thousands to choose among.

 

CATE: California Association of Teachers of English. GSDCTE: Greater San Diego Council of Teachers of English

8 thoughts on “This is what we do.”

  1. I love this perspective. I wish I’d started earlier to pursue a writing career, instead of trying to fit it in around the “day job”. But being published for the first time in my 50s, a book for which I won an award, was no less sweet and rewarding. To be honest, just finishing my first book was exhilarating!

    I have often advised friends and family who asked for advice on going back to school, “you can be 40 (50, 60…) with a college degree or 40 without one”. The same is true of writing. I would only regret not continuing to write or never being published, and these days self-publishing makes that goal all the more attainable for everyone.

    • Hi Deborah, thanks so much for your comment. I know how hard it is to do the writing while we have a day job, plus family, relationships–all the things that also demand our attention. And I think that’s the thing about writing: it doesn’t really demand in that same way, so too often, those who want to write put it off (I was pretty good at saying “as soon as” for a lot of years). Congratulations on your award-winning book. And yes, let’s just keep doing it. And thanks for that note about “you’re going to be 40 (or 50, 60…) college degree or not. Same with writing. With anything. I appreciate your perspective on this.

  3. Nicely expressed Judy, always a joy to read….

    For me writing is very much a personal practice – getting down on paper my understanding of the journey through life and my place within it. It’s simply what I do; whether it’s perceived as good or not, publishable or not. Come rain or shine I do it – that’s the commitment, that’s the practice and in the process somehow I’m enlarged, I’m moved into a place of deeper comprehension and meaning….

    “ Home is where writing happens. The writer’s desk is a miniature world. Self – contained. Hopefully quiet. Anywhere else is somewhere else.”
    GAIL SHER

    • Thanks, Michael. Nicely put. I’m of the same mind–just getting it down on the page, good or not (and who’s to judge?). Most of what I write will never be published. I imagine that’s so for most of us. Still… we do it!

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