Elizabeth Percer's Blog, page 3

Writer’s Log, November 1: Grammar Cops, Cowboys, and Deputies

I have a confession to make. Until I had to start teaching grammar about ten years ago, I knew very little about it (despite being a published author and having earned a few advanced degrees). As far as I was concerned, grammar was for people too stuffy to write for fun and too snobby to care about what the rest of us were doing. Real writers, I thought, learned enough about language by being in the trenches as readers and sitting down at their desks every day to wrangle with words – sort of like cowboys too cool to stick by the rules, snickering behind their hands at the stiff-backed policemen who enforce the laws of society.

But then I started a job teaching composition to college freshmen, and their genuine questions first showed me how unfamiliar they were with grammar, and then showed me how poorly equipped I was to help them. My insatiable hunger for reading and writing had accidentally taught me how to string sentences together with flair, but when asked to teach what I knew, I suddenly realized how many serious holes there were in my own foundations.
Still, I regarded the copy of Janis Bell’s Clean, Well-Lighted Sentences that the department head handed me suspiciously – even superstitiously. Surely this would take the wind out of my creative sales, I told myself. And in all honesty, if there weren’t kids depending on my expertise, I probably would have let it gather dust along with all the other books of its kind on my crowded shelves.

But then, reading that book was like finding the matches to so many puzzle pieces that had been swept under the rug. “So that’s where that goes!” I found myself thinking again and again. And what’s more, I learned how much easier writing could be when I wasn’t guessing at how to convey certain meanings. You have probably already come across one of my favorite examples of this: the difference between what we mean when we write “Eat, Grandma!” and “Eat Grandma!” But that little book was full of thousands more similar jewels, each giving off new light and clarity to the language I already loved.

When I was a kid, there weren’t many Janis Bells around. We didn’t have Grammar Girl or Grammarly. If I had a question about grammar, I had to ask Mrs. Stewart, whom I loved and revered and found absolutely terrifying. Usually, I chose to wing it rather than risk exposing my ignorance while she stared over those little glasses at me with those unblinking, piercing blue eyes.

In the past few decades, though, someone had the brilliant realization that most writers don’t want to know every last rule of grammar and style known to wo/man. We just want to know what will help us get our meanings across, and have the freedom to break the rules every once in a while – provided we know which rules we’re breaking in the first place, and can understand the consequences. Starting a sentence with ‘but’, for example, doesn’t bother me in the least (as seen above). Even allowing fragments to stand for sentences, or deliberately misplacing my modifiers with as much chutzpah as a bartender mixes drinks.

I guess I used to think that you either followed the laws or you didn’t. You either became a member of the grammar police force or you embraced your status as an outlaw. But I think most of us need something in between. Maybe a sort of grammar deputy, if you will, who knows and likes everyone in town and enforces the rules to maintain order but who has a warm sense of humor and isn’t going to give you a ticket if you’re speeding on the way to the hospital. As I write this, I’m guessing mine is kind of a hybrid between Barney Fife and Barney Miller. There’s probably something seriously wrong with me that my deputy is a cross between two white men with apologetic smiles, but I guess they kind of remind me of my dad. They’re familiar and caring and want the best for everyone involved, but they’re not afraid to stand up for what they believe in.

Anyway, I’m sure you can find your way to a far more expansive and modern grammar deputy of your own. But I do hope whoever it is has enough integrity to keep you on your toes and enough humanity to win your trust. Because depending on how you approach it, a working knowledge of grammar can prove useful in endlessly surprising ways, clearing the way and shortening the distance between call and response, between the thrill of expression and the even greater joy of being understood.

Writer’s Log, October 25th: Election-itis

My sister and I were chatting last week about how profoundly this election seems to be affecting us all. I realized that I’ve been walking around like I’m six weeks pregnant: slightly nauseous, eating too much sugar and salt, cranky, excited, terrified, generally out-to-lunch and distracted by this nebulous thing that seems to have overtaken my every waking thought. It seems like November 8th can’t come fast enough.
Right now, so many public conversations seem to be all about winning or losing. Presumably, this particular conversational thread will diminish after the election. But we all know that just as the end of a fight in a marriage might bring temporary relief, it’s not a sign that the issues are in any way closer to being resolved. In fact, if anything, the fight itself is a great sign for those on either side of an issue to buckle down and rededicate themselves toward finding a solution that respects and honors both parties.

Yet while this analogy might work for relationships, as a country we’re still not wildly fond of conversations that threaten to betray any emotions that might have got us killed on a frontier or ostracized in a colony. But it’s impossible to truly know bravery and brotherhood and success without acknowledging their darker sides: fear, anger, and suffering. And I think we’re paying the price for trying to pretend we can ignore or surpass or belittle them. They’re growing ever louder and more intolerable, and one might argue that they’re at the heart of most discussions about the economy, immigration, and education, to name just a few of the many deeply nuanced and complex issues that have resulted in so much ineffective mud-slinging. Frankly, most of us, no matter what our political affiliations, would rather shout or shoot than sit down and sweat out a decent conversation with someone on the other side of our pet viewpoints. But if we’re going to unite as a country, how well is shouting and shooting at each other going to work for us?

I grew up in a household where there was a lot of shouting and a good deal of smacking, too, usually by those who were so unwilling to face their fears, anger, and suffering that almost any way to deflect them was preferable to facing them head on. I think this is part of why I became a writer, because it was in books that I found the kind of conversations that brought life’s darker emotions and experiences into the light where we could all see them and all note how we shared them. And while books certainly don’t represent the only – or even the best – way for such conversations to get underway, they do continue to remind me how unexpectedly powerful clear lines of communication can be.

One of my favorite quotations is from Winston Churchill. “If you’re going through hell, keep going.” You can’t turn around and try to find your way back, you can’t stop and freak out, you can’t blame someone else for hell, you just have to face the worst with a sense of humor and your wits about you. Maybe a rediscovery of the true potential that dialogue has in a free country won’t solve any of our major issues, but it might just help us to reunify enough to take that next step through hell together.

Writer’s Log, October 18th: Can writing be taught?

Anyone who’s ever spent time studying the craft of writing ends up running into this question, usually in a dark academic alleyway haunted by cranky grammarians and people who believe poetry has to rhyme. It’s an interesting question, to be sure, but in all honesty, I’m not sure if it’s all that relevant anymore. A question I find far more interesting is: How is writing learned?

We have all had great teachers and teachers who shall not be named. But where writing is concerned, I’m not sure the teacher matters half as much as the student. In fact, once the basics of grammar and syntax have been mastered, the writer needs to become her own best teacher in order to really grow. And while these basics absolutely must be learned, they are not hard to come by (preposition police, please note the new normal). Sure, they can be incredibly boring, but once you unpack them, the written world is your oyster. Think of it as a few miserable months that pay off in spades. You don’t even need to go to school; there are many great books out there that will take you through what you need to know and nothing more. Clean, Well-Lighted Sentences by Janis Bell is a favorite of mine.

But beyond those widely available building blocks, when it comes to constructing a writer in the real world, it is the writer who must be most aware of what she needs when and why. Perhaps she needs the constant surrounding of a classroom with deadlines and peer criticism and tons of feedback. Perhaps she needs to go hide in the woods. Either way, she is the only one who can tell what will work for her. And sometimes, she’ll also need to know when something that she’d thought would work forever has run its course. But in all instances, it is her own awareness of what makes her writing thrive and her own willingness to nurture those conditions that work best for her that will turn her talent into an identity. In short, she can benefit enormously from feedback and guidance and support, but it is the work she does alone, within herself, that will make her into a writer.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” my students’ expressions say when I tell them this, “now, what did you think of my story?”

Le sigh.

It’s enough to make a writing teacher (and yes, I ‘teach’ writing, though I prefer to think of it as a combination of planting seeds and untying knots, so I am clearly not the writing teacher of choice for many) throw her Webster’s out the window. Fortunately for all of us, these things don’t always follow a linear progression – or, rather, I think they follow more of a circular linear progression – spiraling upward until the distances between experience and expression grow shorter. For example, I am sure my writing teachers told me many of the same things I now tell my students, but when I was in my teens and twenties I just wasn’t in the space to hear it. Some people are, for sure, but I was one of many possessed by a hunger to achieve and saturated with the sophomoric conviction that life can be WON!

Thank goodness writing can be learned at any age. We are all narrators – stories are what we use to shape our lives. And coming into our stories can happen when we’re eight or eighty. It took me a really long time to have faith in this truth, to believe that no matter how old I get, I will never know it all. Not knowing it all, in fact, felt much more like a threat than an opportunity. But the writing has shown me how wonderful it is to be someone who still has something to learn, something new question to ask, something new to say.

Writer’s Log, October 11: The Bystander

There’s a certain type of writer that emerges at the fringes of any healthy writing community. He or she shows up to events and listens carefully and reads faithfully and comments insightfully, but when you rightly sniff around to ask about any writing they might be doing, they get that old seasoned sea captain expression on their face and explain that they wrote, once, and cut you off to gaze off into the middle distance as they daydream about their one true love, the one that got away. Or, like a battle-weary soldier with half a limb hanging off, they glare at you as if you’ve miss the most obvious of points, which is that writing has hurt and abandoned them indelibly, and anyone who suggests otherwise is just going to pour salt on the wound. In either case (and in many other cases), there’s a sense that any idea of their own writing touches a nerve too tender to ever heal, that they’ve been given an irreversible sentence where writing is concerned and they’d rather not talk about it, thank you very much.

Here’s a little thought exercise, though, just for shits and giggles: replace every use of the word ‘writing’ in the above paragraph with ‘love’.

Curious, isn’t it?

I often talk to my students about writing as a relationship that needs time to grow strong, that showing up every day to it with integrity and honesty and humor and the best attitude you have available to you at the moment is the key to unlocking its charms. This seems counterintuitive to those who’ve only dipped their toes in, even if they’ve been standing by the side of the river for years. Because until you dive in, the river’s power seems insurmountable and maybe, if you stand there looking at it roiling by for too long, probably not even worth your time. Isn’t it better to just observe and admire, anyway? Who wants to get wet? After all, the human body is only, like 70% water, right? That leaves a whole other 30% that obviously wants nothing to do with anything that’s not safe and dry!

But what if you never really try to love? Never really try to form deep relationships? Or give yourself a timeline for these things, say, true love by forty or no love at all? A publishing contract by fifty or you never write again? How is that going to work/working for you?

The really sticky thing about all of this, unfortunately, is that it requires you to open your heart for target practice. Which is totally not OK, but clearly none of us gets to change how that works (and how many do all of us know that have tried with everything they're worth?). But it’s SO much better than keeping it closed. If it’s closed, it never has a chance to expand, build the strength to weather the tenderizing, enjoy the new expansiveness that settles when new ground is cleared by loss. I'm pretty sure that, whether you want to write or love or live well, you’ll need to leave plenty of space to allow for the wobbly and wild range your heart is capable of. It won’t reward you with idealized love and Pulitzer prizes every day, but the countless untold and sweeter rewards that come have the very real potential to add up to so much more.

Writer’s Log, October 4: Harvesting

Ah, harvest time. The time of pumpkins and colorful leaves and crisp air and getting the kids’ Halloween costumes on time and figuring out who to invite for Thanksgiving and how not to gain fifteen pounds by Christmas because you’ll have to attend a New Year’s Eve party that your ex will be at it and you need to look good. I bet it makes even Martha Stewart want to crawl under the bed with a box of oreos and a backlog of People magazine until January 2nd.

Isn’t it strange that harvesting is sort of supposed to be the opposite of all that? A time for reaping the rewards of patient waiting and gathering essentials for the long winter ahead? But who has time? After all, if you plant something, aren’t you supposed to be constantly tugging at the fruit or adding MiracleGro or insisting that if it isn’t ready according to schedule, heads will roll?

Here’s the thing, though: lots of things, including novels, will simply refuse to develop under these conditions. Sure, we can force them to deliver some premature, shriveled version of themselves ahead of schedule, but they’ll never really blossom. And their fruit definitely won’t be productive in turn.

We usually think of writers as solo artists, delivering solo acts. Ultimately, that may appear to be true, but I’d be willing to bet that most of the writing that really sticks with us has pretty deep roots. Writing is, after all, an act of communication, which makes it also an act of reaching out. And sure, you can reach out and, say, smack someone right this minute, but maybe you could also reach out more carefully, more genuinely, with a little more vulnerability and a little less intention? After all, things only grow in concert with the earth, not simply because they’re on it. And in order to do so, they also usually need to be out of our sight and out of our hands.

Am I actually saying that if you’re stuck on a big project, written or otherwise, you should just take your hands off the wheel? I am (at least for a little while, though you might want to stop the car first and roll down the windows). Think of it this way: you can gestate by bouncing around with your fetus and reading pregnancy books that make you want to check your urine every hour and/or avoid every gram of sugar within a ten mile radios and/or call up your long-suffering obstetrician to demand a weekly sonogram, OR, you can put your hands on your belly and think warmly about what you can’t see, and/or feed the person it rests within good food, and/or talk to it, even when it’s not answering. Because underneath all that noise and hurry and worry and demand, there’s a quality of waiting that’s graceful and observant, a self-settling that helps you get quiet enough to really listen to what’s developing and maybe actually hear what it has to say.

Writer’s Log, September 27: Practice, Practice, Practice

I’m sorry, but isn’t this just the most annoying advice in the world? There’s nothing worse than someone telling you to calm down and slow down when all you want to do in reaction to, say, a political election that is dividing your country, is stress eat under the blankets with the cat until it’s all over. Because it’s just so painful and counterintuitive to slow down and focus on addressing deeper, more complicated problems in the things that truly matter to you when your pulse is racing and your temperature is rising. And the absolute worst part of this truly, epically annoying advice is that it's almost always right.

Ugh.

Sometimes, I think it must be fun to be Trump. You speak/bully/opine first and think later (maybe). He reminds me of a charging bull; it’s really hard not to look away when he’s snorting and pawing. Until, of course, you realize that his rage is a compulsion that will not respond to reason and you hope you have enough time to hop the fence and get out before he charges in your direction. Trump is sort of like rage and reactivity in general; when you’ve had enough, sometimes it just feels right to throw a tantrum. Or back someone whose excellence in this skill surpasses all others.

But that satisfaction is so temporary. When there are really important issues and a country’s welfare at stake, there is no easy way to manage the rage that comes when we all look around and see how unfairly life is going for so many, at best, and how just as many others are facing flat out injustice.

I have little political savvy, but I do think that political blow outs usually reflect symptoms, rather than the problems themselves. And part of me wonders if one of the big problems we Americans are collectively facing is a tendency toward quick fixes that have a lot of flash or make a big bang, a reluctance to slow down and really face the music.

Writing has taught me a heck of a lot about how slowing down helps to achieve seemingly impossible dreams, while hasty work done with the sense that someone is breathing down your neck or looking over your shoulder almost always ends up in the trash. Still, practice doesn’t come easy. Trusting in the good and measured is oftentimes hardest to do when it’s most desperately needed.

My kids all take music lessons. Oftentimes, their practices sound like the musical equivalent of an auctioneer on a crowded floor, tripping over the cattle. “I’m done!” they exclaim after plowing through three pieces in as many minutes. It’s hard to explain to them exactly why that’s not going to pay off, long term. After all, it gives them more time that afternoon to play, and they technically did what they were supposed to, so win-win, right?

But for the longest time, no matter what I said, I couldn’t get through to them. it wasn’t until I started taking music lessons myself that something shifted. Because as much as I love words, actions usually matter even more. I took several years of piano when I was younger, but I didn’t really learn to practice until after I became a writer. Now, I take my pieces very slowly. I separate each hand, and study the musicality of each line before studying the musicality of both lines put together. For several weeks, my kids looked on sympathetically, the way you might look back at the runt of the litter when he’s trying to find his way toward a teat. But then, somewhat magically, I had a piece with several movements mastered, and it was like someone threw on a switch. “Wait!” I could hear their little brains churning, “If all that painfully slow, much-less-than-promising-sounding practice Mom did resulted in the actual mastery of an actual piece of music, maybe, just maybe….”

And there just might be where it's at. Quick fixes won’t get us anywhere. They’re like the junk food of the world’s problems; obviously more delicious and appealing at first sight, nutritionally vacant in the long run. But if we dig down and take the time to invest our bravest and most meaningful attention to even the small things that matter to us, well, maybe, just maybe….

Writer’s Log, September 20: Who Are the People in Your Neighborhood?

When I was in high school, I had what might have been my favorite job ever: working as a tour guide for the Longfellow National Historic Site. Located just outside Harvard Square on an old, tree-lined street, the Longfellow NHS is a grand, yellow house on a few acres of gardens with ancient lilac trees and gentle walking paths. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow lived there with his family for most of his life, and the house remains gently haunted and peaceful – a wonderful place to spend an afternoon. (Though now they’ve renamed it to include Washington’s Headquarters, because Washington slept there for about nine months. But in my mind, it will always be just Hank and Fanny’s.)

Anyway, one of the things I loved best about working there was that we had to learn as much as we could about the Longfellows and their lives in order to earn our docent stripes. And one of the most wonderful things about being a poet in 19th century Massachusetts was that you were in very good company. When Longfellow had a rough day with his quatrains, he could take a walk along the Charles River with his buddies Emerson and Hawthorne, or chat politics in his study with Charles Sumner, or get some excellent shade from perhaps the most epic frenemy of all time, Edgar Allen Poe.

You would think that in today’s world of high speed and instantaneous communications, the same sort of relationships would easily develop, albeit in a virtual world. Personally, I have a few, dear literary friends, but I don’t see them as often as I’d like. Sometimes, those instantaneous communications make it somehow harder to meet up with people more casually, to spend time in their company and listen to their unvarnished thoughts. I’m not sure anything can change that, for the moment, but one thing that enhances my sense of a literary circle is the habit I’ve formed over time of making an adoptive literary family tree. Clearly, I need a snappier name for it, but here’s how it works: I’ve identified those authors who, for whatever reason, shore me up when I’m feeling lonely or untethered as an artist. I don’t let the likelihood of whether or not they would pay me any mind if we actually knew one another, because this is my imaginary tree and I get to put whoever the *&%# I want to on it. Then I go and spend time with one of their works, and it really and truly helps. Right now, I’ve been visiting with Ann Patchett, that distant cousin I always want to know better but am content to adore from afar. Charles Dickens is always there, as some kind of great-grandfather watching over efforts to produce grand and funny and smart old-fashioned novels, especially those that contain brilliantly circuitous sentences that, like great puzzles, invite you to dive in and untangle their rewards. Longfellow is the somewhat dottering but sweet second cousin who’s always glad to see you; William Maxwell is the not-at-all creepy but quiet and gentle uncle who lets you sit in his company without talking; Elizabeth Bishop the lesbo aunt that takes no prisoners and makes you want to be just like her whenever she’s around. I could go on, because I’ve made sure my tree has tons of branches, but I think you get the idea.

So what I’m curious to know is: Do you have a literary family tree? Or just people in your ideal literary neighborhood? Please share! But fair warning: I might want to borrow a few of your seeds. Hope you don’t mind a little cross-pollination. (Ok, I get it, that’s enough punning for a Tuesday morning. I’ll leave off here.)

Writer’s Log, September 13: Does this Ego Make Me Look Fat?

I was having coffee with one of my dearest writer friends this weekend when the subject of ego came up. She is gracious and funny and ridiculously talented and accomplished, so I was surprised to hear her mention how much she struggles with Ego, too, that side of herself that can’t bear to look good and always be at her best. Let me tell you: Ego is a bigger buzz kill when it comes to creative work than Discouragement and Poor Self-Esteem put together. Working with Ego while you’re writing – or drawing or dancing or latch-hooking – is like having a pageant mom always breathing heavily over your shoulder, making you wear heels and makeup to the playground.

But if you’ve ever been proud of any work you’ve ever done, it’s hard to keep Ego from shouldering her way into the creative process of whatever comes next. She’s really tricky, too, coming in with nothing but praise for you and your potential, seeming for all the world like the kind of champion that cheers you on, not the one that would drown kittens to win The Gold. And there’s nothing you can do to get rid of her, no matter how hard you try, because she’s programmed into you from the get go. So, what to do?

I wish I could tell you how to get rid of her, but I can’t. I do think it helps to know she’s there, or that’s she’s almost always on her way. A stage mom never misses a performance – or even a rehearsal, for that matter. But maybe she doesn’t have to sit in the front row. Maybe you can build a nice, plush chair with purple velvet upholstery for her in the nose bleeders, and tell her she deserves the rest for all the inexhaustible work she’s doing on your behalf. Maybe you can remind her about the award you won for best depiction of Mozart in macaroni when you were in third grade; I don’t think she’s that fussy about the kind of wins you get – like an empty soul who lives for someone else, she is just hungry for wins of any kind.

I’m not sure if this is the way to appease her, but I do know that it’s vitally important that you don’t let her get close enough to whisper in your ear, because if she does, she’ll be digging her invisible talons into you when she does. But this is sometimes harder than it looks, because while she’ll be the first to go shouting your accomplishments from the rooftops, if you give her too much encouragement, she’ll soon be sneaking into your room in the middle of the night to whisper her unreasonable, unimaginative ideas in your ear.

And I have to say that nothing helps more than keeping that last little bit of information close at hand: namely, that she IS unimaginative – anyone who only wants to be #1 is going to have massive failures of the imagination. After all, who can really create under such conditions? I don’t believe there is such a thing as that legendary artist who believes in himself above all other things and creates unchecked by whatever feedback, criticism, or wonder comes his way. The truth is, I think creativity comes from compassion and caring deeply about the world around you – particularly when it comes to how our humanity gets expressed and discussed and interpreted by us all. So while I know Ego is always going to invite herself to the party – and usually shows up first – I find it does help to remind myself that she is not the most interesting guest, rarely even fun to talk to, and is best relegated to the tables in the back with my unreasonable second-grade music teacher and the dentist who put me in braces.

Writer’s Log, September 5: The Pit of Despair

I returned to writing this afternoon after a hiatus of a few days. My husband kindly offered to manage the house and kids on his day off while I took several hours after lunch to dive back into my latest project. Unfortunately, things didn’t exactly go as planned. Instead of disappearing into a blissful state of play and productivity, I took a wrong turn somewhere into the quicksand of the Internet and wound up in The Pit of Despair.

And yes, I’m borrowing from The Princess Bride (again?). I told you I was in the PoD. And sure, the first thing I want to do is throw my computer against the wall and dramatically give up writing for good and not consider for a moment that my depleted state might have something to do with a weekend in the sun and a few sick kids and a tickle that’s starting in the back of my own throat. Instead, because I somehow managed to arrive at adulthood with less than 100% of the recommended mental health, my earlier programming is telling me to just wallow, to read something into this sorry state of creative no-go, to sign a lease in the PoD and measure for curtains. Dark ones.

And the second thing I want to do is rise above, like a radiant, Oprah-infused, future candidate for sainthood who doesn’t get all tangled up in her leash. Who knows better. Who has the wisdom to pull back and reflect and find her sense of humor and purpose in one fell swoop. But the only problem with that is I am human.

So what's a girl to do? Well, I might be the only person on the planet who actually found a little comfort in the white-faced, shaggy haired denizen who introduces us to the PoD in the movie. “Don’t even think of trying to get out of here,” he says matter-of-factly, but I must say, it’s a fairly decent piece of advice. Sometimes, it’s much better to know that you’re in the PoD and not leap to conclusions. You don’t have to live there. You don’t have to leap out of there like you’re on fire. You can just survey the grounds, feel what you feel in there, and then walk out through a back door someone forgot to lock.

I’m sure PoD days are not for artists alone. It’s hard out there, for all of us, even if you’re living your dream, because living a dream means reaching beyond reality for something only you can see, and that can be lonely, stormy, uphill work. So I’m going to take a PoD day, call in sick to my muse, nurse this passing emotional flu with some family time and stupid TV and good food. Because this is the work, too – allowing for the humanity of it, the insecurity of it, the low points that make us able to reach out to others with compassion and empathy. It’s one thing to make a great thing, a greater thing to slow down and maybe comfort someone – even if it’s just yourself -- in the process.

Writer’s Log, August 30: Don’t Quit Your Day Job

It’s always heard as an insult, this particular piece of advice. It’s what we tell people who’ve gone out on a limb to seek some kind of fulfillment that doesn’t offer immediate pay or benefits, usually after their early efforts at fulfillment result in singing/dancing/writing/macramé that doesn’t sound/look/read/hold its knots together so well. It’s also yet another reason lining up behind the thousands that are collecting to take a shot at artistic exploration, like so many disproportionately hostile kids waiting to dunk their beloved teacher in a shallow tank of water. And like the other members in its gang, this reason has a kernel of truth to it. It makes a certain amount of sense to never quit the job that keeps a roof over your head and food on your table. More than a certain amount. And it’s also unlikely that artistic endeavors, no matter how successful, will provide quite so successfully.

But is this such an ugly truth? It’s true that the lens through which we view our lives can sometimes change how we live them. I grew up with a mother who could not afford to quit her day job, which was raising the four of us while my dad worked 60+ work weeks to provide the shelter and education they both wanted for us. And in this household, "don’t quit your day job" wasn't advice; it was an insult. It was what my mother told herself when she couldn’t make time to work at her writing, and the writing stagnated, or didn’t develop according to plan, or was never seen as something that could develop and improve just as certainly as children can. So when I started to write, and the writing didn’t look good, I walked away from it, certain there would never be a reason to quit my day job(s).

But then, in an ironic twist of fate, my day job became full time caregiver to my own three children – and something critical shifted in my thinking. I suddenly didn’t have as much time to write, so the time I had I used ten times better. I suddenly cared about something more than my writing, and it freed up my creativity and sense of play. I suddenly realized that being a writer was nowhere near as interesting as living a life worth writing about. Not quitting my day job, it turns out, made me a heck of a better writer than hours spent in ivory towers and libraries, mooning about talents I could only hope to have. And lo and behold, I wrote a book. Then another. Then a few more.

It has never been easy. I still fight against my demons almost constantly. But in a sense, my mother did me the favor of showing me how dangerous it can be to swallow common wisdom about what make a writer a writer, what makes a mother a mother, and so on. And if I think about it too carefully, it doesn’t make sense that I can be a mother to three children and still write novels – just like it doesn’t make sense to look at a bee and suddenly understand the alchemy of honey, or to look at a great stretch of land in Texas and know that the world is round. Time and perception are much more flexible than we usually let on, and there are great reasons for this. Some of those reasons may never make sense to us in our lifetimes, but that doesn’t mean they need to work against us. Just because we don’t understand something, or don’t have a clear understanding of what lies ahead doesn’t mean that we must be suspicious of it, demonize it before it’s even drawn close. Which makes me wonder what other kinds of perceptions we might shift toward greater kindness and creativity if we can shift the ones we make about ourselves.