Tonight I’m sitting at my desk and writing about something that has been stuck in my head (and written on my to-do list) for nearly a month. I need a literary laxative or something, because it’s not coming out smoothly.
Many people would coo and encourage me to take my time, to wait ’til the story’s ready to be told, or some such thing. But that’s not really how writing works most of the time. When you do it for money and some sense of self-actualization, I have to tell you that it’s more “labor” than “of love.”
If you do a good job, though, you love it. You’ll do it again. It’s a lot like that other kind of labor - the gooey, birthy kind. My mom sweat and groaned through hours of natural childbirth with me before having an emergency C-section, and then she had my sister a few years later.
There’s a lot to be said for forgetting how you got to the end result.
Before I get started, I’m going to read and think and even do push-ups, because I don’t know how to write in a way that is true and fair to my experience.
I’m starting my delivery tonight with this excerpt from an essay called “Five Writing Tips” featured in Amy Tan’s The Opposite of Fate. We can all use it:
Those are the five writing tips: Avoid cliches, avoid generalizations, find your own voice, show compassion, and ask the important questions. I hope that you find them useful, if not for writing the next Great American Novel, then for thinking about your life and the world around you. What you do with your careers will be only one part of the whole of your lives. Your thoughts, your evolving answers to the important questions, are what will give you interesting lives, make you interesting people capable of changing the world.
