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The Joy of Writing
by Shirley Abbott
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I recently uncovered a diary I wrote years ago on my first trip to France, when I was in love, or thought I was. It survived by some miracle--for I have been careless about preserving my own things. Those pages were like finding gold in a lunar landscape. I’ve all but forgotten the guy--blond, I think, with a beard--and he comes across simply as the all-purpose dream man, but I created myself very clearly on paper, 21 years old, determined to have what I wanted, on fire with romantic ideas. This portrait of the young me was better by half any photo from that year. I was learning the ropes, and the words I wrote, for my eyes only, were a better guide to romance, and writing them a more intense experience, than strolling hand in hand through Luxembourg Gardens. The journal prepared me for loss--for though it was April in Paris, we were not meant for each other. It gave me a way not only of thinking about love but of drying my tears, observing my own sorrow when the inevitable break-up came. My words packaged the experience for me, made it memorable, clear, gave it a validity that mere recollection can never have.
Recently, too, I exchanged a large packet of letters (we xeroxed everything) with an old friend--letters we had written over many years, from our twenties onward. We had made a pact, when she moved far away from me, not only to continue our friendship but never to throw away so much as a postcard from the other. (I am sorry to say that letters began to taper off as the price of a long distance call decreased.) reading these letters was a voyage of discovery, a record of my life and thoughts as well as hers, filled with events I thought I had forgotten, people I had stopped thinking about. Some say that even when you are writing to a friend you expect letters to be published, and perhaps that is so. These letters are our joint autobiography, and joint biography of a friendship. They will never be published and do not need to be. They are a wonderful bond between us, and a record of how our friendship was built. What if we had never written these letters, or had thrown them away?
I speak as a writer, a woman, the mother of two daughters, and the girl I once was--because that girl is still alive in me as when I was 16. What has kept her alive, I believe, is writing. I have written something every day almost since I learned to put words on paper. I have loved the words in my head and on the paper from that moment until now. In one way or another, I have earned my living as a writer. For pleasure and for pay, I have written poems, short stories, advertising copy, themes and research papers, cookbooks, diaries and journals, picture captions, letters and e-mails, articles for magazines and for the newsletter I currently work for, as well as three book-length memoirs. But all this--this career stuff--is of less importance than the personal benefit writing has brought me. And can bring any one, I believe, who is willing to commit herself to the Word. You need not have ambitions as a professional writer in order to benefit from writing. You need never earn a penny from it. You need not be the star of your language arts class. The joy of writing is yours if you want it.
What joy? What benefits? The benefit of communicating with yourself, of valuing your experiences enough to set them down. You may become your own best counselor. Second, writing is a form of exercise. It can make your blood flow and sharpens your mind. (For all I know, it might even help you lose weight, provided you don’t munch while you write!) Your brain cells, your emotions, are not muscles but they crave exercise as your legs and arms crave it. They get this exercise in many ways, but writing may be the best way. Third, language is a universal possession, part of the pleasure of being human. Your budget may limit your ability to travel, or to buy the clothes and equipment you want. Some handicap can keep you from taking part in active sports. Your musical talents and desire to perform may be minimal. Writing is the most accessible and at the same time private way to provide an outlet for your thinking talents, a workout for the mind, a means of understanding yourself. It costs nothing, requires no equipment, beyond a pencil and paper. The training is supplied at school, and by your own reading, and by practicing the art on your own.
You may stumble over grammar and syntax, you may not know how to begin the essay your teacher wants you to write, but you were born with a model for language in your head. The software for language was in your very cells. You only added the vocabulary. You spoke before you walked, and by the time you could stand on your feet you had picked up a pencil or crayon. The ability to use language is as much a part of you as your eyesight, or your ears. To learn to use your muscles. Language, if you let it possess you, will confer its own very valuable forms of fitness, health, of well-being.
Getting Started Writing
Do you write letters? E-mails? If so, keep copies, not of the casual notes but the good long ones that really say something about you. Have you ever kept a diary? Hold on to it. If you have never written just for yourself, try keeping a journal for aweek. Write a paragraph, two sentences, every night before you fall asleep, or every morning before breakfast, or whenever you can set, and keep, a date with to be alone for a few minutes.
What should you write? You will discover the answer by writing. What do you need to know about yourself? What do you need to understand about your parents, your friends, your moods, your problems? If journal-keeping doesn’t work for you , try writing letters to yourself or to a friend, or to someone you admire from afar. You need never mail these letters, but it can cure writer’s block to imagine you have a listener. Try poetry, if you wish. The easiest way to begin is with form, a structure: write verses of four lines, with rhymes or near-rhythms. If your mind is temporarily blank, look around the room or out the window and describe what you see. Get it down on paper. Throw out efforts you consider failures. Try again. You alone will decide which of your writings are worth preserving. |
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About
the Author |
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Shirley Abbott
: Shirley Abbott is the author of Womenfolks: Growing Up Down South, The Bookmaker’s Daughter: A Memory Unbound and Love’s Apprentice.
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