The other day one of my students (we’ll call her Izzy),
whose love of writing I have been nurturing all year, raised her hand, shaking
it in the air like a pompom, and waited with eyes wide and brow furrowed
impatiently. When I walked over to her desk to find out what was the matter,
she flashed a broad, excited smile and said, “Ms. Salazar, I have a world
inside my head”. I paused for a moment
to savor my triumph, smiled back and said, “Me too!”
For as long as I can remember I’ve had a motley crew of
characters living in my imagination. I’m
not talking A Beautiful Mind here. I
can’t see them and they can’ talk to me, but I can immerse myself in their
world, research the details of their lives, build their houses, and write their
stories.
The trouble is, sitting down to select and arrange words in
such a way that a reader feels the texture of a characters’ emotions and
understands the deeper meaning of an offhand remark the way that I feel and
understand them, is hard.
Of course, writing is a craft that can be honed through study and
practice, but at the end of the day you, the writer, are still faced with a
blank page to fill. I can’t be the only
writer with the cleanest laundry on the block.
Even after there is no more laundry and the rough draft is
written, there are revisions to make, query letters to write, submission
guidelines to follow and rejections to face.
The process can be very discouraging and it can be very difficult to
hold on to an Izzy-like passion for the world inside your head.
I have been lucky enough to find a community of writers who
provide encouragement and keep me accountable. I have to write or revise something in time
for the next contest or the next critique. They also provide perspective. To be a published writer always seemed like a
distant, glamorous thing that other people did, but in the past year or so I
have met dozens of successful, published writers who are just like me.
Izzy is at the beginning of a long and hopefully fruitful
journey. I hope that, after she leaves
my classroom, she finds a community that supports and encourages her creativity
and her dream to become an author. I
know that the journey is worthwile.
