Santa Claus flies a sleigh pulled by reindeer, lumbers down brick chimneys, and stashes gifts under light-strewn evergreens. In operating rooms across the country, surgeons dress in hospital-green outfits, don paper masks, and remove tumors from unconscious patients.
Behind closed doors, writers sit in desk chairs reading, thinking, and writing stories, poems, and plays.
We hear, “You are what you do.”
How about, “Do what you are.”
Are you Santa? Are you a surgeon? Are you a writer? If you’re a writer, wherever and whenever you approach a page, lay down words — one and another and another and another. Write words while you can. Write them despite a busy holiday schedule. Write them because of a busy holiday schedule. We are writers. Writers think, writers compose, writers stick with it.
Writing gifts
So happy writing season! Here are a few gifts from Santa – oops, I mean other writers. These were gifts to me that I give to you with best wishes for your writing life.
May Sarton in her book, Journal of a Solitude: “My own belief is that one regards oneself, if one is a serious writer, as an instrument for experiencing. Life—all of it—flows through this instrument and is distilled through it into works of art. How one lives as a private person is intimately bound into the work.” Pg. 77
Amy Tan in her book, The Opposite of Fate: “When you are told, ‘It was meant to be,’ ask, ‘Who meant it? What does it really mean?’ Is someone trying to make you accept an undesirable situation or one in which you have doubts? When you are told, ‘Shit happens,’ remember that plenty of other things happen as well, such as generosity, forgiveness, ambiguity, and uncertainty. When you are told, ‘It’s simply fate,’ ask yourself, ‘What is simply about it? What are the alternatives of fate? What is fate’s opposite?’” Pg. 295
Edmund Morris in his essay “On Becoming a Writer” in the anthology The Writing Life: Writers on How They Think and Work, edited and with an introduction by Marie Arana. “I grew to love the silence, even the mini-silences that swelled between one word and the next, and to this day, when words won’t come, I listen for them rather than look for them. Sooner or later one that sounds right will whisper itself onto the page.” Pg. 183
Enjoy your writing holidays!
Marie Pinschmidt
Great essay. Enjoy the Season and keep writing!
Margaret Best
Yes, writers write. One word after another and eventually the words make sentences and then sense.