Hello, writers. I hope you’ve been having a productive 2024. I hope the words have been flowing, and I hope you’re making sound progress on your projects, whether they are novels, short stories, essays, or whatever other exciting hybrid forms you might be conjuring up. The year is still fresh and new, and there are so many opportunities not to be wasted.
I admit I’m thinking a little more darkly this month about indignities. Nothing huge to complain about in my writing career, but just all the little ways the indignities can add up, and how other girls and women may be discouraged along the way, made to feel that all they have to offer is small, pitiful, puny, pathetic. Whatever word you want to use. I’m thinking about the party I went to where I told a guy I had just met that I was a writer, and he leaned in, trapped me against the wall, and told me what I needed to do, and what I was probably doing wrong, and what I should write about. Never mind that he wasn’t a writer himself. He had opinions. He had ideas, advice, instructions. He kept me from the rest of the party for a while, even though I had come with my boyfriend, and he had things he needed to tell me that I was probably doing wrong.
I’m thinking about the college instructor who sent the sly unspoken message that only male writers could be truly great, or the other instructor who told a story on the first day of class about a girl in his workshop, when he was a student, who had flirted with the professor to get ahead, and that was clearly why her story was published in the prestigious magazine that the professor edited. No other reason.
I’m thinking about the way the male students in one class ended up circled around the professor at one end of the table, while the girls sat at the other end. Maybe as each girl came into the room and made her decision, it was an independent one. Maybe everyone just wanted to sit like with like, and felt that subtle draw. Or maybe there was something deeper going on, something about the climate of the class, the atmosphere, and I was not wrong to feel that I was, basically, a second-tier writer in that class. Always an also-ran.
I’m thinking about all the advice I’ve received from male authority figures, instructors and professors, over the years. So much of it, insightful and helpful and wise. But also some of it wrong-headed or just not seeing what I wanted to do and why I needed to do it that way. I remember all the times I’ve sat listening eagerly, turning my pen in my hands (my preferred nervous habit), absorbing the wisdom.
I’m thinking about how when a family friend asked about my work, she called it my “little scribblings.” And how well-meaning it was, just a friendly inquiry. But of course, of course she would call it that. All of these little memories I have; I don’t want them to be a long list of grievance, or to seem like the outpouring of bitterness. They are merely observations. Experiences. And I know, so many other women writers, so many writers of color, have far worse things in their memories, volumes of moments where they were made to feel less than worthwhile.
I’m thinking about the courage it takes to write honestly, truthfully, about all the weird little things there are about being alive, and how if a hundred times, someone reminds you that you are small, amusing, quaint, silly, or just irrelevant, then the one hundred and first time, you just might believe them. You don’t want to let those sorts of moments define you and define how you feel about your writing. But they do have a way of creeping in, when your defenses are low. You begin to wonder if what you have to say is fresh and important.
Anyway, here’s me saying, these moments don’t define you, and they don’t define your writing. You keep your head down, keep the truth and strangeness in your work, keep turning the pages out in the quiet hours of the darkness when you are beholden to no one, or in the secret snatches of your life — you keep on.
Your writing exercise:
This month, try inverting the power dynamic in a scene you’ve already written. If you’ve written a scene with a teacher and a student, or an offended person and the offender, or a scene with class differences, etc., see what would happen if you wrote where the power balance had shifted the other way. What would it mean for the other character to hold the reins of the scene?