“It is learning to discipline ourselves to stay with a question long enough to determine what insight it has for us that is important. Otherwise we will simply know what everyone else knows about it. As Goethe puts it, ‘All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart knows more.'” -Joan Chittister
My manuscript did not win in the PNWA historical fiction category, but this morning I’m feeling pretty good about the entire experience .
I was a finalist!
I heard some inspiring speakers, including Greg Bear and Deb Caletti.
I met Margie Lawson, a psychologist, writer, and writing instructor I had never even heard of. She gave workshops on topics such as visceral emotion and rhetorical devices, all of which I already know (don’t I?) and yet I (gasp, groan) have fallen back into my prologue and first two chapters. For now, my nagging doubts about how to proceed with my unassailable rewrite are scattered.
Of course I bought a big bag full of books and got some of them autographed.
I met other writers who are on this journey, too. (No writer writes alone–conference motto.)
I thought often of my daughter Pearl at the American Idol auditions. When anxiety threatened (I really would have liked to win a prize, competitive person that I am), I thought of Pearl bravely singing in front of the AI producers, one of thousands of other unknown teens and 20-somethings.
And this morning, I got up early, filled my thermos with coffee, walked out to my potting shed, and spent two hours writing.
It’s all good.
“I have advice for people who want to write. I don’t care whether they’re 5 or 500. There are three things that are important: First, if you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think about things, what you think is fair and what you think is unfair. And second, you need to read. You can’t be a writer if you’re not a reader. It’s the great writers who teach us how to write. The third thing is to write. Just write a little bit every day. Even if it’s for only half an hour — write, write, write.” ― Madeleine L’Engle
I love Madeleine L’Engle, but I came across this not in my voracious, thirsty reading of her books but over at the Aerogramme Writer’s Studio.
