On her second album, Beautifully Human: Words and Sounds, Volume 2, Jill Scott has an introductory track called “Warm Up,” which is just a layering of sounds that a vocalist might use to limber up his or her vocal cords. It’s only a little over a minute long, and serves an introduction to the whole album. In a way, I guess this what this piece serves as because it’s my way of getting ready for the challenge that lies ahead. Next month, I’m starting the National Novel Writing Month (called “NaNoWriMo” for short) Challenge. The challenge is simple: construct a novel by submitting word counts every day for the month of November, culminating in at least 50,000 words by the end of the month. As such, I figured that I needed as much encouragement as I could get. So I invited a few more friends to my writing Facebook page to help in the encouragement.
There are those who’ve read my writing before and who have been hounding me to finish one book—just one. And I have to thank these people for their undying patience and faith in my ability to do so. And those of you reading this for the first time may be asking the same question I’ve received from those supporters: “What’s taking you so long?”
My first and most substantial answer (to everything really) is that life gets in the way. When I’m not writing it, I’m living it. I get caught up in the absolute busyness of life. And that makes the way I want to express the story change. In the past few years, some of my largest challenges were completing my Master’s degree, where I HAD to write daily on topics that were not my choice; marrying, moving, and having a kid, all within a two-year span; and teaching, where I get the opportunity to help others hone their craft. Most recently, the part of life that deals with loss has affected me profoundly, to where I’m just bouncing back out of the thick haze of grief. Somewhere in all that, the writer in me got lost.
The other substantial reason is fear mixed with a heavy dose of insecurity. Writing, while wonderfully cathartic most of the time, is also the process of baring one’s soul—turning a body inside out and exposing sinew and self to the world. Even though I write relatable characters based on people I’ve encountered—to the point where some of my friends see themselves as my characters—deep down, all those characters I create are facets of me: my thoughts, my aspirations, my anxieties.
On one level, I’m already feeling self-conscious. Compound that with the niggling thought that I’ve always had about my writing. There are millions of writers out there, those who are alive, and those who have left a living legacy. Who am I to add my voice to the symphony? It’s really only been in recent years that I’ve broadened my audience to beyond that of my best friend and allowed a couple more people to read my writing, even though technically anyone out there can read my blog. I feel grateful that when I do get the courage to expand my audience (usually at the pace of about one person per year), they display positive reactions to my writing, usually with the request for more. And this helps to validate my confidence a little. Ironically, as I was composing this piece, an Op-Ed piece from The New York Times popped up on the Facebook newsfeed called “The Op-Ed and You.” The line that attracted me to it provided the answer to the question I posed above: “there’s never too much good writing in the world.” To add to the answer, I saw another newsfeed from Good Morning America about The Waltons 30-year reunion, which just happened to be an inspiration for one of my favorite pieces I wrote as a freshman in college.
That’s why I write, and that’s why I teach writing. I believe in the power of words, and how they can transform an ordinary event into a powerful experience.
I hope you’ll continue to follow me as I venture out and take that leap of faith that will make me finish.
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