Write Now

I was telling Mick last night that I'm feeling rather zen about my writing. I'm aware when I'm in the company of accomplished writers that I'm no journalist, no lyric essayist, no novelist. One of those I don't ever want to be (journalist); the other ones I do hope to be, when the time comes. The zen feeling of all that, is that ultimately I must write to write. That's it.

In re-reading Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones and after meeting all the shewrites women for coffee recently, I'm feeling grounded. Whatever I write is what I write; it's true when it comes out of me, and it's true to my experience, and if I allow (and discipline) myself to write regularly, some of it could be great.

If I write about parenting, if I write about my childhood, if I juxtapose images or ideas, if I write about current events or ancient history, so be it -- regardless of whether it comes out as simply blogworthy, or as publishable in the Christian Science Monitor's Home Forum, or publishable in The Sun (*sigh, flutter*). Likewise, if my novel comes out as utterly awful prose - as the first draft of a first novel - so be it. With everything, I'll keeping writing, working, re-working -- all for the sake of that commitment to write.

Eckart Toll wrote "Be here now." I just wrote in my journal, "Write now." That's meaningful in different ways and it inspires me within the realm of discipline, craft, parenting, and dreaming.

This also inspires me, and I think it says a lot more succinctly what I'm trying to say:

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

-C. S. Lewis (1898 - 1963)