Winter Solstice Contest Manuscripts

December 13, 2005

What a treat to see the manuscripts come in. Via e-mail or snail mail.
And they all seem so intense. It's amazing to me how energizing and excited I am being privledged to see other writer's work.

Being part of this contest is a real treat. There are so many people out there with sensitivity, high consciousness, and the desire and courage to put their feelings on paper.

I congratulate you. It makes me more pushed to get my own things out.

And I keep hoping more memoirs and fiction will arrive. As a writer, beginning late to move into high seriousness about her own work, I would like to help others not wait as long as I did.

In 1978, I took a year off from my career to try and write. And then I gave up and went back to "orthodox" work. Such a pity I was so unloving to my beginning pieces. They were far better than I realized. I damned them because the New Yorker wouldn't publish. What a bad writing mother I was. How naive I was about the process in needing to practice to become better. I needed to know that if I'm writing from the heart, the act of writing becomes as much "payback" as publication. (I once would have thought that comment "corny" and "unsophisticated.")

Back then, all I needed was trust in myself and the patience to keep going. And perhaps someone to tell me those things. But, alas, that didn't happen.

So I went back into the formal career world where with raises and promotions I could fake myself into thinking I was getting what I wanted.

If you want to write, do it-- write write write. And don't worry overmuch about how good it is. Just write and love the fact that you have the passion to want to arrange, toss, throw words on paper. I have NEVER (and that's saying a lot) seen a writer who practices who does not improve and move nearer the visions that prompt her/him to sit down and put hands on keyboard or pen to paper.

Happy holidays. Claire