I was thinking about Ericka Lutz's blog about her relationship to her writing career for a couple of hours last night, trying to determine what my relationship with my writing career  is all about.  What a provocative way of looking at the writing life!  I wanted immediately to respond to her, but I had to think.  When she connected symptoms of depression with her feelings about her writing experience, I realized I was thinking about my writing, not my writing career.  While my writing career has its ups and downs, it doesn't seem to matter as much to me as that thing I do every day, writing. Of course, it's easier to have an upbeat focus on the career aspect when things are getting published.  I know that.  So maybe it is a luxury to focus on my writing. 

My writing is my raft, my lifeboat, my guide, my love.  It's my constant, my hope, my fuel, my fire.  And it has always been like that for me, except when I was so submerged by my life events that I couldn't find it.  I always knew my writing was there, somewhere, but it was covered by grief or diapers or full-time work.

But after my sister died in 1993, something bust loose in me.  My writing popped up out of the busyness of my day and I knew I could no longer ignore it.  However, what I have had to allow for myself and my writing is that fact that it needs to grow.  When I started out in the early 90's writing fiction, I couldn't quite get myself to clarity.  It was like I was behind a fogged up window, and my readers were on the other side.  Yes, they could see the words at times, the characters, the themes, but I couldn't make the story clear, couldn't give them the whole thing.  I had to realize that my work was speaking to me and not completely to my readers.  So more classes, more daily writing, more study.  And then back at a story. 

An example for me was a story I wrote in 1995, worked through a writing class taught by Molly Giles, worked on some more with my writing group, and then put away.  A call came for stories from a certain magazine, I sent it out, and it was finally published in 2000, winning a big money prize (for me, at least and at the time) and a cute little plaque!  But when I read the story, I saw how while it was a good story, it was more like some kind of story/poem hybrid, full of symbols and metaphors and a weak plot.  Really, the plot was about a woman sitting at a counter and then getting up to go talk to her husband.  The middle was flashback.  Not exactly a plot.

And it took me a number of years to really think in novel shape and form.  My first novel--as I wrote earlier this week--came from a short story.  Now, I can sit down and write a novel from beginning to end--and it's a novel.  Not a poem, not a short story.  The glass has cleared, the steam evaporated.  The story exposed.

But there is still work for me to do.  I know this because this has always been the case.  I am assuming that in later years, I will look back at these novels, and say, "No, dear, the glass was not clear.  Look at what you were doing."  And I will have moved past whatever it is that doesn't work.  And there will be something else to obscure the glass, but I won't be able to see that yet.

So my writing and I are like my life.  I know there is work to be done, but I have to do it.  It's what I have, what I was given, and I always need to grow and strengthen my skills.  My writing comes along with me everywhere, my companion through time, this thing that I have and love and appreciate and who always sustains me.  I honor it, and thank it, and marvel that I have been able to take something I love as far as I have been.  I'm grateful.  Sure, my writing and I have stuff to do, ways to improve.  Thank goodness.

Jessica