Write For Your Life
I just finished reading Write For Your Life by Anna Quindlen. I am always on the hunt for insight to improve, increase, stretch, deepen, enrich my writing. In the book, Quindlen is really encouraging people to just write. It's healing and important. Often, it's just for you. It makes the writer's life better, so do not concern yourself with how "good" it is or what other people will think; if it's in your heart and soul, write it.
Twice recently, for assignments for school, the children turned to the blog as the historical record of the family. They needed a reminder of dates or the events and the timing in which they happened, and there was the blog to fill in the gaps that long-term memory had created.
Can you imagine the delight I felt in those moments? Not just that I was helping them with an assignment that they cared enough about to be accurate, but that we have a living document that fills in those moments that would otherwise be lost.
And then, earlier this week, Lindyne texted to ask if I remembered the address of the house we all stayed in together on our Chattanooga weekend. I did not remember, but I knew there would be a blog post about it, and that blog post would contain the link to the house, and...there you go. The "Freeze Your Half Off" weekend lives again.
That feeling from the Zora Neale Hurston quote; that pressure that builds inside my soul when I know there are memories that are slipping away, the minutiae of life fading as time passes between when the event happens and I get the blog post written; I do not know if other people have that feeling, but I feel it every day. Or the agony of having a story idea, and before you can get it written down, it is gone. I carry that grief constantly.
Early in my relationship with Buds, someone from his family told me that not everyone uses words to share their feelings, and I have thought of that many times over the years. Just as some people can't imagine what it is like to drop into a story and disappear, it is so hard for me to wrap my mind around not writing as a way to make sense of my life, this life, our shared life.
As Quindlen writes above, "So what if your story of a small, unremarkable life is read only by you, in some quiet corner, or by one or two people you love and trust to understand?" Other than my belief that each life is remarkable, this insight of hers is so freeing. These words matter to me, and my beloved few (Of which you are one.), and that gives me joy, and agony as I try to craft memory into emotion and capture the feeling of the moment.
