February 2009

How Do You Know?

During a recent school visit, I was asked a question that stumped me. Not that that’s anything new. But this question was straight out of my own novel, from a character’s mouth.

“How do you know if you have what it takes to be a writer?”

It’s a question from my book, In Search of Mockingbird, the question that Erin’s mom asks in a letter to her literary idol, the question that twenty-five years later spurs Erin into getting on a Greyhound bus to spend over thirty hours traveling more than twelve hundred miles to talk to Harper Lee. The same question that stumped me.

I looked at the student’s hopeful face and I wanted to reassure her. I wanted to say something inspiring, that when you’ve finished writing a scene or short story or essay, you’ll just know you were meant to do this work. Or that with hard work and persistence, you’ll get published and achieve success in this field and feel confident that you chose the right path.

But I had to tell her the truth. I told her that even after publishing two books, after receiving good reviews and recommendations from CCBC, the Amelia Bloomer Project List, and nominations for awards such as Best Books for Young Adults, I’m still waiting for someone to rat me out as the fake I am. Every day I still ask myself, "What makes you think you can do this? Why would anyone want to read what you’ve written?"

And worse yet, most of my ‘author’ friends also struggle with this same question. On any given day, one of them is on the verge of quitting altogether, of giving up what Georges Simenon confessed, “is not a profession, but a vocation of unhappiness.”

We do what we can to validate our choice of profession. We attend writer’s conferences and belong to writing groups, we huddle together over strong cups of coffee to talk about this wretched business, how the latest editor’s rejection had nothing to do with our writing, but just his/her eccentric taste.

I recently completed an MFA Program in Writing for Children, determined to work harder at learning my craft so I might feel worthy of the title "author."

I loved being with a group of other writers and working closely with a great advisor who reminded me that the realities of publishing contrast what we really do, what we’re meant to do, which is to write. It helped to concentrate on the act of writing and not the business of writing. And it helped feeling that I’m not alone, that we’re all grappling with the issue of whether we have what it takes.

When I look back, I wish I’d said something smarter to that student. I wish I’d told her about the satisfaction of having written a good sentence, or the sense of accomplishment you feel when you see the spine of your book staring back at you in the bookstore.

I did tell her what I’ve been told hundreds of times: to write what haunts you, what you feel so strongly about that no matter what else you do, you keep thinking about it. I told her to write as often as she could, to keep a journal, and to read, read, read. I told her to keep learning her craft. And I told her to daydream and not worry if she has what it takes.

Because nobody really knows if she has what it takes to be a writer. But in doing all of the above, maybe in the simple act of doing the work a writer does, we’ll someday realize that in "doing" we actually "are."