I am not going to be a Great American Writer, and I’m not eligible to be any other nationality of writer, great or otherwise. I’m going on 72, and at this time of life, people tell themselves and others that Grandma Moses didn’t start painting till she was in her seventies, so there’s hope. But it’s getting harder to believe I could succeed, despite Grandma Moses’s example.
Grandma Moses, “Sugaring Off” (1955).
When I was 20, I thought I could become a Great American Writer. My favorite college professor, whose name I can’t share because it’s the answer to a lot of “favorite teacher” security questions on a bunch of websites, was a tremendous editor and cheerleader. I sent him everything I wrote—poems, fiction, plays—for forty years and he read it all and commented in the margins and told me I was the best student he ever had and to keep writing. So I guess I have been blessed to find a Great American Teacher.
But back to writing. No one ever said I couldn’t be a writer, although if I’d told them I wanted to be a Great American Writer, some of the dolts would have said there are no great women writers (this was the seventies). I could have invoked Emily Dickinson and Jane Austen. They would have said something about the exception that proves the rule or snickered at the mention of Jane Austen. The 1970s, like the 1800s, were hard on ambitious women.
What no one ever told me was that if you want to become a great writer, you have to write for at least four hours a day. This is the advice that all writers give when they become great enough to publish books about their writing process. When do these people find four hours a day to write? When did they ever? I was in college and working and already not sleeping enough, and before long I was in grad school and working and married and had two babies and was really, really not sleeping enough. I was grateful when I felt a poem coming on—sort of like a migraine, but with less throwing up and more imagery—and when I handed in papers on time and my pen didn’t run dry during an essay test. That was about all the writing I could squeeze in. Things didn’t get much easier as life went by.
When I was 6 years old, my mother bought me an orange spiral notebook with a cowboy riding a bucking bronco on the cover (we lived in Texas). It was a special place to write my poems (maybe so I would stop bugging her to take dictation, although she never said so—she was another Great American Teacher). I wrote a lot of poems—well, verses—and also stories, like “Nancy Drew and the Brownies Solve the Mystery at Fairy Valley.” I apologize to Carolyn Keene (I know, she wasn’t a real person) and to the Girl Scouts for borrowing their characters, but I’m sure it was a bracing whodunit despite the giveaway title indicating that all would be well in the end.
I continued the spiral notebook tradition, carrying its successors with me on my pile of books all through high school (along with whatever novel I was devouring, thanks to the public library). I wrote my way through at least a dozen of them, writing poems, transcribing song lyrics, recording thoughts, sending daydreams curving along the pages. Maybe my teachers thought I was taking notes. Even then, writing came in bits and snatches, certainly not in four-hour blocks.
I guess if you are a Great American Writer these days, you have to have a Wikipedia page. I don’t. The possibility seems so remote that I haven’t checked. Well, okay, I just checked. Nope.
I know that I will never find four uninterrupted hours a day for writing. After all, I have to exercise to keep the evil achey fairies away. And there are those French, Spanish, and chess lessons on Duolingo, and cooking and laundry and other homemaker stuff. The two babies are grown up, but they and their babies should get more attention. Still, I’m writing, putting pen to paper or fingertips to keyboard, and telling myself encouraging stories about Grandma Moses. I guess I have another few years to really become great, or greater.
Maybe next time I go to the store, I should look for a spiral notebook. Or maybe I could ask Grosset & Dunlap publishers to accept a really old derivative work?
(Me in my Brownie uniform for school picture day, 1962. Already a writer.)
Sisterly Kindness 