the writing

While listening to my professor do a reading of her work, I was reminded that I am not a writer. I am not a story-teller. I am not a speaker. I am a beginning; I am at a starting point. And to now, my life has been cushioned by parents that are still together, a fiancé that loved me years before I thought anyone would, a small town where people didn't talk about their problems unless everyone was already talking about them. I felt I had nothing to write for. Nothing to write about. Nothing of consequence to share.

There is a quote that has followed me for the past few years Raymond Sokolov said of Norman Mailer in 1968, "In the end, it is the writing that will count." It lines the inside cover of my Moleskines, has been on various Post-it notes taped to desks, and lives on a permanent Sticky on my computer.

A conversation with a good friend this week circled around our writing habits. How was I surviving without a creative nonfiction class? How was she keeping on task with her low-residency program? What did we think of the Poets & Writer's top MFA programs list? And each of these questions brought us back to the same struggle we'd been having with ourselves.

How do we tell stories?
What does is mean to tell someone a story, and what meaning do these stories have?

"I write pretty," my friend said. And I knew just what she meant. I too, as Nabokov said, "caress the detail, the divine detail." And in showing my reader the exact path we will be taking, in painting the floor under their feet and filling in the air we are breathing, we become lost. We see the scenery clearly, wander a bit, looking and touching and smelling, but what is the final feeling? What are we left with? I struggle with telling stories. I describe scenes; I create a place or feeling or if not feeling at least a sensation.

Today, while eating blueberry pancakes and drinking too much coffee, my ethics professor challenged me and a fellow student to not only write, but publish our writing on our blogs, every day for 90 days. He reminds us that it does not matter if it is pretty or cohesive or part of a larger whole, because as Sokolov said, it is the writing that will count. We will write and we will post until our writing becomes our breathing. We will tell stories.

And so I am challenging myself, beginning now, in this moment. That here, for the following 89 posts, I will tell my stories. I will limit my language, pace myself, move the reader through a narrative, no matter how short. Because if we don't share, what happens? If we don't write it and shape it and become something, then there is nothing.

So here I go--deep into myself, to find the story I've started.
But I'm not go alone. I'll be helped by:

Telling True Stories, a book that I found listed for another journalism class (I'm sure that me buying it from the bookstore meant someone actually in the class couldn't. I'm over it.)
Malcolm Gladwell
Brevity, which first turned me to creative nonfiction in a real way
Creative Nonfiction
and of course, my professor Brad