When I teach in person, people sometimes show up having purchased a copy of the recently updated edition of my first instructional book on writing: Writing in a Convertible with the Top Down, which I co-authored with Christi Killien Glover. Their interest prompts me to include exercises from that book during our class time together.

This week, I’d like to share two excerpts from this book of letters between young adult author Christi Killien Glover and poet/personal essayist me about writing—why we write, what we hope for when we write, and what keeps us going as writers.

The first excerpt is one of my letters to Christi at the opening of the book. The second one is an excerpt from very near the end of the book.

The Bus:
How do we get started writing and keep going?

April 29

Dear Christi,

Once I dreamt a boyfriend and I were on an English double decker bus. The bus driver spun around in his seat and faced us. He was blind-folded and continued to drive the bus. I was seized with panic.

Waking, I remembered my boyfriend said something the day before about going forward on blind faith. The dream must certainly have expressed my fears about “blind faith.”

Eight years later, urged on by my soon-to-be husband, I took the Parachute Jump at the World Expo in Vancouver, British Columbia. The experience was as close to weightlessness as one can get. In the seconds it took to land, my upper back tensed, becoming hard as stone. Without a feeling of being grounded, of having weight, I had tried to hold myself up by becoming a mountain.

It isn’t easy to “go with the flow” or to “let the universe support one” or to “tune in to your right path.” Beginning a piece of writing is always an act of “blind faith.” There is nothing on the page. I begin on the blind faith that I can write something, that I can continue writing, that somehow I will find the right and satisfying place to stop. When I am inventing, I must become weightless, tumbling around in my own imagination and experiences.

As an inventor, I try not to keep my feet in someone else’s writing, beautiful as it may be. I consider other people’s writing like a stream I can sit beside in the sunlight, with birds flying and singing above me, small clouds across a blue sky. I remember I feel good sitting there and that sitting there helps me take in the sunlight, the birds, the white clouds, the blue sky.

When I begin to shape my inventions, I look at how other streams flow place to place. Then I insist that I face the blank page and begin my scribblings. I must share my early drafts and have trusted readers respond to my work, not critically but by noting first the parts that interest them because they stir emotions—empathy, sadness, joy, shock, regret, to name a few.

Next, I must hear from my trusted readers what places are unclear to them, what places raise distracting questions for the readers or lead them away from their emotions. At this point, I must never listen to the words “good” and “bad.” I am not looking for “constructive criticism” because in criticism of any kind there is separation and distinctions. I must receive response instead of criticism, because in response there is connection. Feeling connection with readers outside of ourselves is the most valuable tool we have for going on and shaping good writing.

Yours while the light is long,

Sheila

Freshman: What is the writer’s job?

October 20

Hi Christi,

Rereading your letter at my desk on the second story of my house, I sit under windows and look at the tops of two trees against the storm-grey sky. The just turning Japanese maple (the leaves aren’t done on that tree most years until Thanksgiving) thrives at the corner of my house, and the evergreen needles of the tall pine across the street toss in the wind. The motion of the pine tree in every gust reminds me of the aquarium plants my son would buy years ago at the pet store around the corner. It was the first store he could walk to himself, no streets to cross, saved quarters, nickels, dimes, and pennies in his pocket. He’d come home and plunge the tiny leafed things into the water. The air filter bubbled the water through the miniature branches of the plant. Well, that was years ago—at least ten or eleven.

How interesting that the past you are remembering is one of not being yourself, of yearning for a home you could not make. You are going to write yourself a different past in the name of Jenny Walcott who can make herself a home with your sensitive fingers as you build that possibility board by board, so to speak, at your computer.

And here I am, hungry for the past I shared with my children when just a week or so ago I shared the “now” with my son and wanted nothing more! I sit in the present with the past so close I can see the algae on the aquarium walls, smell the outdoors on my son’s little boy body as he labors to pin the plant securely in the gravel.

I could not have known how deeply I’d taken in that underwater plant when my son brought it home until I looked this day at this tree in this storm influenced by the longings in your letter.

Today my mother brought me as her guest to a Brandeis fundraising luncheon where three authors spoke—novelist Shawn Wong of Chinese-American descent; magic realism fiction writer Kathleen Alcalá of Hispanic descent; and poet Bernard Harris of African-American descent. They are all writing their way toward home. Mr. Wong wants to claim this country for his own after generations in which his family left a legacy of hurt as well as love. Ms. Alcalá tells the stories of her Latin American grandmother for whom the seen and unseen were not as separate as they are for us further north. Mr. Harris, in what the panel moderator called “social gospel,” writes of how his home could have turned out to be the penitentiary instead of the one he shares with his wife and daughter.

Signing the copy of his novel Homebase, which I bought, Shawn Wong wrote: “The best stories come from home.” But do we remember this home or do we make it? Perhaps in writing we can do both.

Yours where the pine trees and aquarium plants connect,

Sheila

A KEY: REMEMBER WHY IT IS IMPORTANT TO YOU TO WRITE

TAKE IT FOR A SPIN

Read some books in which writer’s talk about why they write and what they see as their job. Writer’s at Work, edited by George Plimpton, is a set of interviews with writers first published in the Paris Review. The Writer’s Journal, edited by Sheila Bender, is a compilation of unpublished writers’ journal entries by forty writers along with commentary on how keeping a journal works for them. Jack Heffron has edited The Best Writing on Writing Volume 1 and Volume 2. The Writer on Her Work, Vol 1 and Vol 2, edited by Janet Sternburg, is also a wonderful collection of writings by writers on writing. This is just a small sampling of the many books that are out there.

Even so, these are voices you probably won’t run across in a typical academic education. But they are written by the people for whom writing and being writers comes first. Enjoy their descriptions of where writing comes from and what writers pay attention to. You will find this to be the right “food” and the right “stuff.”