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| 2 hands holding sparklers some long ago New Year's Eve |
When I was a very young child, my Great Uncle Davie brought me an old manual typewriter. He was always stopping by the house with trinkets and pockets full of candy - usually a dutch candy called hopjes. He was a dear old man and I thought he was quite magical.
The typewriter was an LC Smith and Corona and it delighted me for a number of reasons, not the least of which was LC are my initials. And I also think some part of me knew he saw me - even at the young age of 6 or 7 - as a writer.
I loved banging away at that typewriter. The keys were purely mechanical. I have no idea where he found it, but it wasn't in the best of shape and the keys often jammed. But that didn't matter to me. I wrote little stories on it that felt real to me because they were typed. No childish scrawl for my masterpieces!
All through my primary schooling and into high school, I wrote poems and stories. I even included one of my short stories with my college application and it gave me a get-out-of-jail-free pass for Freshman Composition.
Yeah. I thought I was all that in those days. (Until I had to write my first college paper, but that's another story for another time.) Mostly I wrote for the sheer pleasure of wordcraft. Fitting the right words together felt much as I imagine a master woodworker feels using pegs to join wood smoothly and perfectly without glue or hardware. It didn't matter what other people thought of my writing because it pleased me.
Then somewhere over the next few years in college, something changed. I became insecure and uncertain. Part of that was being exposed to a universe of writing I had not even known existed. Suddenly my juvenile work felt, well, juvenile. And I didn't have the life experience or the knowledge of craft to take my writing further. Nor did I have the discipline back then. (Again, another story.)
I didn't stop writing, but I did stop sharing my work.
In my senior year of college, a friend pestered me to submit to the Dean's Prize in Creative Literature. I put him off for weeks until at the deadline, I submitted a sheaf of poetry. And I only did so because I knew I wouldn't win and that it didn't matter because I would be graduating and no one would know my work was worthless.
So. One of my poems won. And there was a monetary prize. It was such a confusing moment. What was more true? When I loved what I created? When I understood it wasn't more than immature ramblings? When some outside arbiter deemed it worthy?
Where is the balance between joy in creativity and its assigned value? How do we navigate those waters?
When my now adult children were in elementary school, I volunteered to run poetry workshops for several different grades between 2nd and 5th. I always loved to be a guest in the classroom. (Teachers are amazing humans. Truly.) My experience was interesting and educational in ways not at all related to the poetry workshop activities I facilitated.
Children in the 2nd grade have a huge variability in their ability to read and manage language. What they may lack in skills, they make up for in utter enthusiasm. They enjoy wordplay and rhythm and rhyme. Working with 2nd graders was both fun and also exhausting.
3rd grade was the sweet spot. Children in the 3rd grade have a basic facility with language and (most importantly) still come to wordplay with joy and spark. When we shared the work they wrote, each student was proud of what they had created and celebrated what their classmates had written. Never did a 3rd grader approach me with a poem to ask if I liked it, or if it was good. They liked it and that was all that mattered.
In working with 4th and 5th graders, my experience was very different. The students approached the exercises as if they were a test. Every single one of them would approach me for consultation and ask if I liked it. If they had done it right. Was it good. And that was heartbreaking. Gone was the spark and the joy and the play.
If there is a single critical skill in creating, it is playfulness. And when we cede our power to an external judge, we lose it.
So how do we keep that spark into adulthood? What about those of us who choose to write for publication? We live in a society where the ultimate arbiter of worthiness is attention - and most often the attention of the dollar. But even in art forms that earn little money, going 'viral' is the ultimate goal. As if what we create is unimportant unless it is noticed. It's a weird variant of the "prosperity doctrine" where if you are successful, it's because you deserved to be successful. If your work doesn't achieve notice, well, it wasn't good enough.
There's that external valuation metric again.
If we wind the clock back to childhood, I see that young girl typing with her index fingers on a large mechanical typewriter, her fingertips blackened with ink from the ribbon that often needed to be unjammed from the keys. She was joyful. She lived for the process of making something from nothing. It was enough to create. What other people thought didn't matter.
I just published my 10th novel. 10 novels in 14 years. 6 year-old-me sitting at that typewriter would have shrugged and kept typing. She knew she was going to grow up to be a writer. She didn't think about reviews and sales and rankings and mentions. She had stories to tell and told them.
I need to remind myself of who I was. And who I can still be.
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