Wed, 17 Sep 2008 13:50:03 +0000
Mystical Hands, Class for kindergartners, Providence, Rhode Island, September 2008 www.carolineallen.com
You know you want to write a memoir or novel. It’s in there, you can feel it, but you haven’t done anything about it. Oh yes, in high school, in college and in your 20s, you did some writing. Short stories mostly. They were brilliant. They had such glowing possibilities. You felt your soul surge forward in the process. It was beautiful. But you gave it up. You thought that was the responsible thing to do. Give it up and get a proper job and be an upstanding citizen.
Well you were wrong. You need to get back to writing. Now. It’s time. There’s no time to waste. Do it now.
When you have the soul of the writer, that need to write never goes away. Ignore it at your own peril. As you get older, that urge to write, that soulful need to express yourself through language, will get stronger and stronger. The gods will knock. Ignore the call, and they just knock harder and harder and harder, until you feel you might lose your mind. You look in the mirror and you start sobbing and you can’t figure out why you’re so unhappy. I believe writing for a writer is as important to their very survival as food is to the body. Eat, write, live.
Some people push down the call to write deep into their bellies. They have kids, a full-time job. Life continues on, year after year after… They think they’re being good by doing all this busy work and ignoring this spiritual calling to be a novelist. I have clients who have children and full-time jobs who are writing a novel. Don’t kid yourself; it’s possible. One hour per day for three days a week and you can have a rough draft of a novel written in a couple of years. Slow, yes, but possible. Step by step ferociously (gradatim ferociter). It’s my new motto.
You were brought into this world under a spiritual contract. You were brought onto this planet to be a writer, a poet, the historian of your family, the one who witnesses and chronicles. You sign a contract for your mortgage, for your job. This was a contract you signed too. With the universe. If you think it’s important to be on time for work and pay your bills, think how deeply important it is to fulfill a spiritual contract.
Don’t wait. Start writing today. That’s an order. 🙂