When I tell people that I’m a writer, I can’t believe how often I’m met with the following sentiment:

"Oh, you're a writer? That's so cool. I write. Kind of. I kind of write. I mean, I would love to be a writer." 

Would you? 

And I tell them, in no uncertain terms, that they should not be a writer unless they absolutely have to be. 

Being a writer means spending hours every day on work that—possibly—no one will ever see. You could be spending those hours on something different, you know, like baking banana bread, or reading a book you’ve been meaning to get around to forever, or taking a nap, for heaven’s sake. You could be relaxing. You will instead be cramming writing in to all the empty corners of your life, and so your life will feel like a jigsaw puzzle with too many pieces, because you’ll simply never make everything fit.

Being a writer means you will have days when the Muse comes floating in your window all covered in silver sparkles, bearing gift-wrapped ideas and fantastic phrases and these truly brilliant plot lines, but those days almost never happen. The Muse will not return your phone calls. The Muse plays hard to get. She’s probably off with some other writer who doesn’t need to hammer out seven drafts of a piece before they finally find a working one.

In case you glossed over what I just said about six drafts landing directly in the garbage: Writing is not easy. You will not sit down at your computer and watch as the sentences and paragraphs spill onto the page like…see? That ellipses represents 10 minutes of me sitting here, staring into space, not finding a metaphor.

Words don’t come free. You’ll pound your brain to find the right ones. You’ll get on your hands and knees and search the corners of your mind for the right word, hidden somewhere on the carpet, like a dropped diamond earring. Your attention will wander off to look for that right word in the middle of conversations, and people will think you’re spacey and weird. And if you don’t find the right word, you’ll be in a bad mood all night, and your family will just love that, I’m guessing. And then you will go to bed and you won’t be able to sleep.

If you are a writer you will struggle under the compulsion to write anyway. This compulsion, I might point out, is not fueled by an editor in New York or an agent in San Francisco who is eagerly clicking the refresh button of their e-mail just waiting for your manuscript. The world does not care if you never write another word. The motivation to sit at your writing desk each day—prying yourself from bed early, sneaking off to your laptop during your lunch breaks or bedtimes or Saturdays—must be entirely self-manufactured. You have to dig your feet into the mud and put your shoulder under the enormous boulder, and you are the one who has to push. I’ve been at this for two years, and so far, the boulder hasn’t moved an inch without my personal effort. 

And then there’s the worst part.

Being a writer means sending the most precious bits of your soul to strangers who will reject it with a form letter, or who will, worse, pretend they never got it. Occasionally a stranger might tell you they love it, and your soul will glow all week, and you’ll tell everybody you know, and then they’ll print it up somewhere and if you’re super, super lucky, they’ll pay you an equivalent of 50 cents an hour for the piece. But usually you’ll just give it away for free.

What makes a writer is the thing that keeps them going, even against all of this. The urgency, the straining at the bit, the lurching in your gut, the frenetic energy, the head-in-your-hands-at-midnight longing, the white-hot hope, the fire that burns without consuming. The idea that one day, your voice will travel in a straight shot, time and distance be damned, and it will soar directly into another person’s ears, lodging permanently in their soul.  

Seed, seed, seed

Our strawberries finally came in. We picked nine last night, and my eldest daughter sat on the kitchen floor afterward, hand to mouth in near frenzy, fruit tinting her fingers red. Last year the sun scorched the leaves in the first weeks after planting; eventually we built a tiny tent to shield them. We saved the plants but saw no fruit. 

Consider for a moment the uncanny design, the mechanism and meaning, the implications and metaphors inherent in fruit.

It’s possible for seeds to disperse without it. There are many other means of seed dissemination: the hundred parachutes flying from dandelion, the seed pods floating gently downstream. Think of how effortlessly the cottonwood tree fills the air with its puffed masses of seed, seed, seed.

These rely, for better or for worse, on blind chance. Wind and water are temperamental carriers. They arrive at will and do as they please.

Fruit, however, is distinctly made to appeal. We animals are predictable in our taste for all things sweet. The animal eats, then chucks or spits or defecates the seeds on the side of the road. Sorry to be graphic, but there you have it.

Animals and fruiting plants climb hand-over-fist into mutual prosperity. The fruit feeds the animal; the animal scatters the seed; both win higher odds at reproduction. Is it any wonder that God crammed Eden full of fruit?

There are plants that cannot reproduce without fruit. A strawberry plant, however, has a choice.

The strawberry, if it’s too hot or too wet, starving or overfed on nutrients, sucked by pests or drained by pathogens, lacking bees or butterflies or some other agent to aid pollination...that’s it, folks: No fruit, no seeds.

Forget fruit, says the strawberry under pressure. Fruit is an extravagance. Fruit requires enormous effort and energy and diverted resources. And if nothing picks it up, it’ll simply fall right near the parent root; a bit of a waste, considering.

Under pressure, a strawberry will breed without seed. Under pressure, it will simply and quietly shoot out a runner, find an anchor point, and belly crawl forward. 

So why fruit? 

The whole appeal of fruit is its far reach. A strawberry's runner may only go so far, but a fruit could travel, in the pocket of a carrier, miles in the course of a single sunny day.

So when the strawberry is healthy, it fruits.

A strawberry, therefore, is not made to crawl through the dust but to reach new territory. 

But I asked you some time ago to consider the metaphor. The fruit wrought of your own hands.

For me, writing is: Seed, seed, seed, and hope that something takes. It seems an impossible business. Each piece I write requires enormous time, effort, energy diverted from other tasks. If no one picks it up, it’ll drop at my own feet: a waste. (On the coffee table at this very moment: another form rejection. How long shall I continue this way?)

A strawberry plant may belly crawl forward in the dust, searching for anchor points, familiar ground to cling to, and sometimes I wish I could skip fruit altogether. Fruit is exhausting. Wouldn’t it be easier? To content myself with a simpler life, to quit this calling, to stop sending missives into a world that won’t miss me, that is everlastingly absorbed in its own handiwork? 

But I am not made to crawl through the dust. And I can’t stop considering it: the landscape outside of my own patch of earth, where my own hard-wrought fruit may land and find soft soil.

Why I stopped reading your writing

My house is littered with the unfinished remains of many, many bad books.

I made up my mind some time ago never to finish bad books. I drop them at the end of the first chapter, or halfway through when I'm starting to lose interest, or sometimes after just a few paragraphs (looking at you, Twilight). Recently, and much to the amusement of my husband, I stopped reading Memoirs of a Geisha five pages before the end.

Listen up, authors of the world: My local library is pretty big, and my life isn't that long.

So I don't waste my time. Why should I slog through boring writing when I could be reading something that rattles my brain, or sends lightning up my spine, or makes me close my eyes and sigh and smile and feel--for the first time in weeks--the ground beneath my feet?

Now comes the harsh reality: This goes for blogs too.

I squeeze blogs into the cluttered corners of my life. I might catch a post or two in the middle of the day when the girls are both miraculously occupied. I could get distracted by a blog in the midst of finding a recipe for dinner, or when I'm answering e-mails, or at the end of the day when the girls are asleep and a million other things wait for me but holy hilarity, Batman, I have to finish this post first because it's making me pee my pants, I'm laughing so hard.

But unless those blogs are so utterly gripping that they'll make me ignore my toddler's request for juice, procrastinate dinner, let the baby cry from her crib one more minute, forget to call back one of my favorite people, and disregard my best friend (aka husband) for a few minutes, I am not reading them.

Allow me to explain exactly when, and why, I stop reading.

1. I can't hear your voice. You sound completely indistinguishable from every other blogger in your niche. If I read a piece of yours elsewhere, I wouldn't know it was you. And after I click close the tab that held your blog, I can't remember your name. I won't go looking for you.

Great writers all have voice in common. Think of the rhythms of their voices. Think of how they string sentences together, how they tack word onto word until it takes on a melody. I'm thinking of the rolling lyrical strum of Toni Morrison, the galloping run-away run-ons of Brian Doyle, the hard stamping anvil of Hemingway.

Your voice should have a music to it. Because if I don't catch the beat, I'm not reading you.

2. Your verbs slump. 
I went home.
I cruised home.
See what I mean?

You can tell a good writer quickly by her verbs. Her verbs kick you in the head. If you don't have killer verbs, then don't bother trying to get my attention. Because without good verbs, all your nouns are just going to lie there, like a cat in a spot of sun, doing nothing worth watching.

So quit with the "was" and the "had" and the "went"--GAH! We've literally got a million words in the English vocabulary. Certainly you can find something in there to paint the picture for me of exactly how you "went."

3. You're addicted to "very." 
Very Addicts are just wasteful with words.

Again: A million words of English vocabulary. Things do not need to be modified with "very;" you can find a stronger adjective, I promise. You keep telling me things are "very pretty" instead of "stunning," and all I can think about is how many moments of my life I'm going to waste reading unnecessary modifiers that leave your writing vague and muddy.

Nope, not worth it. I'm not reading you.

4. You just have nothing interesting to say. 
I get it. There's a pressure in the blog world to keep posting and posting--get several blogs up a week, they say, or you won't gain a following. But I say all this quantity comes at the expense of quality. Sometimes, in the pressure to just. keep. posting, you throw some filler up in there.

I don't think I need to tell you if you're writing filler. You know when you're writing filler. This isn't writing you're proud of, something to clip and put into scrapbooks for future generations. This isn't the stuff you're wishing you could say to all mankind. This is just something to take up space.

But as I've said before, this stuff has got to command my attention better than my toddler, and my toddler is really, really high-maintenance. So say something worth my while.

5. You only talk about yourself.
This one is tricky, because your blog is of course about you. There's nothing wrong with talking about you.

But when great writers talk about themselves you wind up thinking they are really talking about you.

The writing that stays with me means something to me. I have to think about where I'm setting my feet down next in this crazy life, and if you're a really, really great writer, you might make me put my foot down somewhere I didn't originally plan. You can do that by talking about yourself. But only if you draw me a connection.

Great writing should somehow be universal, about everyone, about what it means to traverse across this wild unpredictable treacherous beautiful world. That's what I'm reading for. To find it.

Cotton Candy Craft

Probably one of the weirdest parts of getting married is marveling over how your soul mate could have come from parents who have practically nothing in common with you. Like my father-in-law. Every time we sit down to a conversation, it’s a rare moment indeed when we discover something on which we agree (so far I’ve found The Lord of the Rings and the indispensability of chocolate). Otherwise, we don’t have much in common. He listens to Rush Limbaugh; I like The Daily Show. He likes Jimmy Stewart; I like Leonardo DiCaprio. He’s a meat-and-potatoes Midwesterner; I prefer tofu on quinoa. And when it comes to poetry—something I truly adore—we cannot find one single poet on whom to hang our mutual admiration.

“How can you not have heard of that poem?” we both recently asked one another. I wondered how he could have gotten through school without ever reading Walt Whitman’s “When I heard the learn’d astronomer.” He could not fathom how I’d graduated with an English degree without ever having read the poem that contained the line “Only God can make a tree.”

“It’s really famous; it’s by a famous poet!” he insisted. So, as anyone of my generation is wont to do at the slightest provocation, I Googled it.

“Only God can make a tree” comes from this super sappy poem called “Trees,” by Joyce Kilmer. It begins, “I think that I shall never see/ A poem lovely as a tree” and ends with “Poems are made by fools like me/ But only God can make a tree.”

I’d never even heard of Kilmer, which meant a quick jump over to Wikipedia to find out whether my $40,000 liberal arts education had, indeed, failed to introduce me to one of the greats.

It hadn’t. “Trees” has managed to enjoy widespread popularity in anthologies, but the rest of Kilmer’s work is pretty much unknown, as most of it was rejected by the literati and banished to permanent obscurity. As Wikipedia explained: “Several critics—including both Kilmer's contemporaries and modern scholars—have disparaged Kilmer's work as being too simple and overly sentimental, and suggested that his style was far too traditional, even archaic.”

‘Of course,’ I thought to myself, ‘that’s why my father-in-law likes him.’ The iambic pentameter, the AA-BB rhyme scheme, the sentimental message: It was all exactly the sort of thing that would appeal to my highly traditional father-in-law. But me? Well, I probably have to agree with Kilmer’s critics on this one. The work is sentimental. Yuck.

                 

Why does sentimentality repel us? Or at least, it repels us when it is found in a poem or story, even if we find sentimental tendencies in our own private personalities. Much like picking one’s nose, sentimentality is not seen as an acceptable public gesture but something to be done secretly, at home, and with some embarrassment. And so for writers who endeavor to put forth their work into the world, sentimentality is received like a used tissue, the evidence of the writer’s urge toward an indulgence that ought to have been grown out of by now. Yuck, say the critics. Nobody needs to see this.

Perhaps it is because we—and here I mean the public consumers and critics of what may be deemed Literature—demand that the arts be adequate reflections of reality, and sentimentality produces art with an overly simplistic worldview. Sentimentalism wraps the world in a very neat package and ties a picture-perfect bow on top. Consumers of the arts prefer for the package to be torn open, its contents spread for examination upon the floor. The world is both beautiful and broken, and it is frustrating to contend with writers who insist it is only one or the other.  If they lean too hard toward the latter, the result is too bitter a pill to swallow; if they lean too hard on the former, the result is sickly-sweet as cotton candy, and leaves consumers feeling queasy.

                   

The cotton-candy approach to craft is one of the reasons the Christian presence in mainstream fine literature has diminished so sharply over the last century or so. Like the Catholic Kilmer, many writers who endeavor to write explicitly about faith or spirituality are dismissed by critics (editors, publishers) as sentimental. Even some Christian audiences find the offerings of the Christian community of writers “cheesy,” and lacking in the depth and complexity the faith truly deserves.

Too many Christian authors produce work that winds up sounding like a “Smile, God Loves You!” bumper sticker. It’s unclear whether the work is meant to be fine art or a Gospel tract in novel form. Writers yank the mystery, complexity, and disturbing ambiguity from their work in order to produce a Sunday School lesson for readers. It’s just no wonder that we see so little of it in the world of fine literature. Writers who lean into sentimentality depart from the mode of storytelling Jesus himself embraced—fully aware that he was speaking in parables to people who though hearing did not hear. Great Christian writing not only begs multiple readings and interpretations—it demands them. Too many Christian novels, poems and essays depart from this tradition, finding it irresistible to hit the reader over the head with a figurative two-by-four of theology.

Admittedly, it’s a difficult task to avoid sentimentalism when addressing topics like redemption, transformation, and of course love. How can one discuss these powerful concepts without sounding sappy? 

Too many Christian writers don’t seem interested in finding out.

The new reality

Writing has gotten a lot harder for me lately, exponentially so. I know, I know: I have a newborn. Plus a toddler. The moment one goes down for a nap, the other starts fussing. While one eats, I'm feeding the other, then scarfing down whatever I can lay my hands on, in under five minutes, and it's usually gone cold. Then someone starts crying because she needs to be held constantly, or another starts crying because she's bumped her head on something. It's a very, very familiar story for mothers, one barely worth writing down. We're busy people.

Problem is, I refuse to define myself as a "stay-at-home mother." When people ask me what I do, I'm a writer, case closed. I work from home. This fact defines my day--it means that if both girls are sleeping, I'm not resting, or even doing something like preparing dinner. It means that I have responsibilities that extend beyond babies--even if these responsibilities are mostly enforced by myself, the part of me that says, "You need to get words on the page. You need to write today. You need to get further into this book."

I work every day--or at least, I attempt to. The truth of the matter is, if I don't manage to get much writing done that day, I am officially in a bad mood. Not writing ruins my day. I'm cranky and non-communicative at dinner, and my temper's short all evening. I don't want to connect with anyone. I don't want to play, cook, or talk. I just want to shut myself into a room, by myself, to get something down on the page.

How many words can I really expect to get down every day? Right now, I'm writing this in between nursing sessions. My baby squirms on my chest. I'm trying to eat a bowl of cereal, because I'm famished. I'm jiggling her, hoping to keep her at bay another five, maybe ten minutes. I don't have time to edit this post, much less create content I'm really proud of.

Working from home and simultaneously being present for both of my kids: That's the goal, and I'm currently not meeting it. I feel like I'm keeping about six balls in the air, while about ten others sit ignored at my feet. The most obvious casualty of my choices is housework. I don't think I've cleaned the bathroom in about two months. Yes, two months. I try to do a load of laundry every day (there's spit-up on everything--my clothes, hers, my sheets--plus we do cloth diapers), but most of the clean stuff is getting wrinkled in a basket in my room, or sitting in one of the machines still. The only time I get cleaning done is when I can somehow incorporate it into playing with my toddler: The other day, we took a pretend ride to Mars on a rocket ship, then swept dust from the satelites aka swept the kitchen floor. Spoon full of sugar, right? I'm still working on some way scrubbing the toilet could be part of a space mission.

Mostly I feel bad for the other people in my life: my husband, my friends. I simply don't have the energy right now to be present, to engage. I just don't feel like I have emotional energy left over at the end of the day. Maybe I need some sort of activity that's actually putting energy into me, instead of always zapping it out....writing can do that, when it's going well.

I really hate being a martyr here. This life--at home, with my two girls--was the life I dreamed of, the life I desperately wanted. I am lucky beyond belief to be able to afford to stay at home, not to mention having a home to stay in. I remember this every day, just about. But there's no escaping the fact that motherhood forces you to give up a large chunk of things you used to do in order to keep yourself happy. Like getting a solid night's sleep. Or attending yoga classes (can't afford that with two kids, single income). Or spending a chunk of every weekend devouring a novel that you've wanted to read forever. Or spontaneously going out to dinner with your husband. Until you have children, most people spend most of their lives taking care of themselves--it's a shock to the system, when suddenly you're struggling to complete the basics, like washing your hair.

I know these things might come back one day, when the kids are older and not physically attached to me for the better part of every day. I get that this is a season. That doesn't really make it easier.

End of a Season

A month or so back, a few weeks before delivering my second child, I pulled the drapes shut, climbed into bed, opened my mouth, and, like a snake, swallowed the end of the year. It sat undigested in my throat, bony and twitching. I kept putting my hands to my ears, as though to block out the noise of it, scratching away. It would not go down.

I am not good at waiting. Not for the arrival of a baby that I wanted so badly it made my eyes burn. Not for the end of a year laced with enough discomfort to make a dove squawk. My body doesn't do pregnancy. My entire physical body chafes against the presence of another person inside me. It starts vomiting right at six weeks and keeps it up for another eight months. It brings me to my knees with fatigue. It literally begins to pull me apart, so that things like walking or turning over in bed become excruciating.

In the end I just feel, instead of bursting with the presence of a six-pound person inside me, empty. I have been wrung out. I live in a body that feels like a house in the aftermath of a hurricane.

I sat inside of that house for the last month, remembering where things used to be. Before the waves came and picked things up and deposited them in unexpected places. One does not sustain another person's life for nine months and then deliver it into the world without rearranging the furniture, so to speak. It is most obvious in my physical body, of course: there is a softening there, but there is also scarring, which you may view through the glass of "motherhood makes you beautiful"--or not. Similarly, my emotional self has also been rearranged: softened, yes, and also scarred, in places. There are pieces of myself I simply don't recognize anymore, they have come so far from the origin point.

Thinking about it all now, though, I'm not really certain I miss the way things used to be. I certainly wouldn't go back, not for anything. Scarring and all. Whether I find it beautiful--or not.

In any case, it has been difficult for me lately to do anything other than take in. I absorbed the end of the year, watching and waiting and trying to enjoy the lights and music and teetering on the brink of major life change. This means, basically, that my writing life ground to a halt for a while. In a strange way, I felt like this child absorbed my energy over nine months, beginning with the physical, then moving to the emotional, and finally, in that last month, she took the creative, the intellectual. I sat and rested. I filled myself with as much beauty as I could, hoping it would pass through the umbilical cord to my daughter. But there was nothing left, at the end of the day, to put on the page.

I told myself often that this was a season of life. That it was no reason to panic or despair. That writing would return to me, once the storm quieted, moved on. I would find it beneath the debris, undamaged though changed.

Now that she rests not in my body but in my lap, I am hopeful that the season, like the year, will turn over and become new again.