Tammy Letherer If you and I are connected on Facebook, you may have seen the post about my recent book signing at the Barnes & Noble in my hometown of Holland, Michigan. I shared a photo of the friends and family who came out and wrote, “You know that feeling you get when you bare it all in a memoir and your family not only still speaks to you, but applauds you…? Yeah, that.”
Those kinds of moments of acceptance are indescribable. So too are the insights that often accompany them.
The challenge of writing is to put those moments into words, or at least come close. So I’ll try to articulate another indescribable “a-ha” moment I had when someone at the event asked about my next project.
I enthusiastically launched into a description of the novel I’ve been planning, and as I was listening to myself, there was a part of me asking:
When are you going to get busy?
How many more times are you going to describe this story rather than write it?
I see now that this is another opportunity for acceptance. It feels wonderful to be celebrated by people who know me for my memoir, but when it comes to writing fiction, I have a harder time giving myself the same kind of encouragement.
In The Secret Life of Bees, Sue Monk Kidd writes that “Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can’t remember who we are or why we’re here.” Now that I’ve written a true story that had to be told, I’m ready to return to my first love: fiction. Yet, at this stage in my journey, it feels as if I need to give myself “permission” to return to a world of make-believe.
It was one thing to make up stories when I was younger, but now that I’m a single mother of three kids, there’s a voice within me whispering that playtime is over, that I must produce serious, responsible, income-producing writing.
I hate that voice. It’s a voice that sounds a lot like the one I wrote about last week, the one that says it’s not OK to make mistakes. In creative endeavors, the sense of disempowerment as a result of making mistakes has to be crushed; there must be room to try and fail.
So as my desire to return to writing fiction continues to grow, it’s time to follow my own advice. I have to trust that a new idea is trying to express through me. I have to let go of the fears I have around starting a new project and get real about the fact that If I want to tell other aspiring writers to follow their hearts and write what they love, I have to be willing to do the same.
In a scene in my memoir, I complain to my therapist that I was forced to write a memoir because life was handing me a Big Event:
“I have to say goodbye to fiction, don’t I? I’ll have to write this goddamn story of Dave and me, whether I like it or not, because this is what I’ve been given. It’s like a prison sentence.”
Of course, it wasn’t a prison sentence. It was a choice. Creative expression is always a choice.
And now that I’ve examined what it was like to come through a difficult divorce, it’s time to ask myself if I dare to write something just for fun. (And by fun I mean the torturous, soul-wrenching, teeth-gnashing, ultimately unparalleled satisfaction of creative writing.) The only way to answer that is to do what I tell others to do: Show up. Put the time in. Trust the process.
I’m going to do it, and I hope you’ll hold me to it. And while we’re at it, let’s promise to remind one another that art is always a worthy endeavor, that writing time is not wasted time, stories matter, and creativity always finds a way.
