The Stories We Are Meant to Tell

I wrote this piece in response to a writers group prompt: What is your writing process?

Writing has been my avocation my whole life. From the time I was little, I hoped it would be my livelihood, too. That ended up happening, and I feel really lucky to have made a living doing this thing that calls to me. You know those Zen self-introspection exercises where you are asked to name who you are at your core? Not your roles, labels or the things you do. Not wife, mother, teacher, counselor, consultant. Who are you really---deep down, before life piled all this stuff top on you? In that exercise, I answer “writer.” That’s who I am.

Because writing is my livelihood, a lot of it happens in my office. But I’m not fussy about it. Anyplace I can take my laptop is where I write. It’s a good thing, because I frequently find something captures my imagination, and I have to write it down. I have a file on my desktop called “Interesting Stuff.” There are a lot of questions in there. Do pelicans always fly in odd numbers? (This was later disproved). Do we get signs from our loved ones who have died, or is that us just making stuff up because we need it? Is anybody else as delighted as I am by the little green men all over Roswell, New Mexico, selling everything from civic pride to firearms to parking spaces to Dunkin’ Donuts?

When I go back and look at Interesting Stuff, sometimes I wonder “What was I thinking? Why was that interesting? But it’s a good practice for flexing the curiosity muscle.

I never get writer’s block. I do write junk drafts. If something is not flowing, and I don’t have the luxury of saying “not today” because a deadline looms, I just type. Open my mind and let my brains fall out on the screen. I know it will be awful. But that doesn’t matter. It will be editable into something that’s good. Or good enough. It always happens. What works best for me: think like a turtle; write like a rabbit. Have a long, lazy time to contemplate something before sitting down at the machine. I can’t always swing this, but it helps if I do, especially for a consultant. Writing fast is lucrative.

I see a big difference in what I write for me and what I write for other people. What I write for me is what I put in this blog, or share with my writers’ group, or write just for myself. I got to do a lot of this kind of writing in the last year.

What I write for other people is stuff I get paid for—work for my clients and my magazine. Those things are fun, because I only pick the clients or stories that matter to me. But here’s the thing about writing for hire. I don’t own that. My clients do; my magazine does. Legally, as soon as they pay me for it, it stops being mine and starts being theirs. That’s how intellectual property works. As a result, I am a lot more flexible about how they edit me. There are times when my clients, or my editor, make changes that I am pretty sure degrades the product. Makes things less clear, less powerful, less interesting. Do I rail? Do I cry? Do I object strenuously to the butchering of my exquisite prose?

I do not. I exercise what I call the “two touch rule.” Twice, I will push back. Are you sure that’s how you want to say that? For what you want to get done, might my way be better? After two times, I give up and move on. I have clients who trust me, and often I win these debates. But sometimes I don’t. If it reaches a place where we are continually producing junk together, I have another strategy that works every time: I fire myself. I left my day job at the end of 2020. I could not face one more committee of reviewers taking eight months and 16 meetings and 30 drafts to get back to me with a diminished version of the original. Too many other things were calling. So I left. With no fallout, no regret, and the greatest respect for all of those people. I love those people. They do wonderful things in this world. I just don’t want to give them 10 hours a day of my time anymore.

Now, mostly, I get to write in my own voice. That is a luxury and a blessing. It’s also something I like to think I’ve earned at this point in my life. Writing is the rocket fuel that powers the journey; the Rosetta Stone that makes the Babel make sense. It tells me how I feel about all of it—the good, the bad, the unclear, the heartbreaking, the sublime. It helps me show up with curiosity and confidence in a world that might otherwise defeat me.

I found something--in the Interesting Stuff file, naturally--that kind of sums it up. It’s a quote by someone I’ve never heard of; scrawled on the wall of a Starbucks:

Be messy and complicated and afraid. And show up anyway.

Thanks for the words, Glennon Doyle. I will show up. And then I will write about it.