Answering the need to tell your story

My grandmother was a writer.

She never went to college, never got an English degree or a BFA or a fellowship at a major university, but she was still a writer.

She never wrote for a magazine or published a novel for one of the big publishing houses, but she was still a writer.

From the time she was a teenager, my grandmother kept a daily diary. When she married my grandfather and immediately became a mother as well as a seminary wife, she wrote letters to friends they met with each move to a different city in those early years of marriage. Then, as her children moved out of the house and started families of their own, she wrote letters to each member of the family. She wrote yearly Christmas letters and birthday letters to her children, children-in-law, grandchildren, and then eventually great-grandchildren. She wrote until a stroke took away her ability to write anymore.

And because she was a prolific letter writer and because she kept a daily diary, she had a wealth of material with which to write her own life story, a book she completed with the help of my English professor uncle, who worked with her for years to help her complete a book that she could share with her family. He published it on Amazon before her final decline in health, giving her a chance to finally see her words in print. She left us all with a legacy of writing it all down, proving that she was a writer, even if she would never see her book on a bestseller list.

I started graduate school after eight years of teaching high school English. I had an English degree and had written countless papers and letters and then emails. But despite all of the writing I had done since I was a little girl, I never believed I was a writer.

Then one of my professors asked if we considered ourselves writers. I was in a classroom full of graduate students taking a graduate-level seminar on rhetoric and composition. We had all applied to the program for a variety of reasons, but most of us had never considered the question of whether we were writers, although some believed they were writers in training.

I was in my early thirties, and I finally realized that it didn’t matter if I had been published in a major magazine or if I had written a book that sat on the shelves at Barnes and Noble; I was a writer.

In the time since I was asked if I considered myself a writer, I’ve done a lot of writing. I’ve maintained four different blogs that have served different stages of my life. I’ve freelanced for free and for pay, seeing my work published online in multiple places from Scary Mommy to Real Clear Energy. I even published a book of essays a year ago, taking the plunge into the world of self-publishing.

Am I a writer? Yes, but I’m also a high school English teacher, a wife, and a mom. I don’t need writing to be my full-time profession to consider myself a writer. My full-time profession is helping teenagers discover who they are as writers. My writing helps me to better understand their writing journey. It gives me additional credibility and makes me a better instructor.

But even if I wasn’t teaching writing, I would still write. I write because it is as natural to me as breathing. I write because I love words. I write because I have a story to tell.

I believe that everyone’s story matters, but I don’t believe that every person who considers themself a writer with a story to tell should start making money on their writing or insist that everyone pay attention to them. But if you feel like there are words inside of you that need to find a way out, you should listen to that call to write.

So how can you answer that need to tell your story?

Start by just writing for you

My grandmother wrote for herself and her family for most of her life. Her desire to write a memoir wasn’t focused on making money or finding fame late in life; she wanted to write a book so that her family could better know and understand their history. She wrote her diary for herself and letters for family and friends to communicate and capture that family history.

I know that most of us don’t write letters anymore (an unfortunate development thanks to the invention of email), but you can still keep a journal, either by hand or online. When you read, write down reflections from your reading. When you see something interesting, make a note of what it was and why you thought it was interesting.

Years of social media use has convinced us that our every thought and word is worthy of public consumption, and I’m not so certain that is true. In fact, I believe that social media has fed into our worst impulses, and I include myself in that camp. Years of posting what we are thinking just as we are thinking has led to further division, polarization, and general distrust of our neighbors.

Are your thoughts and feelings real? Yes. Are they worthy of public consumption? Maybe not. Even if you don’t share them, you can let your personal journal be the place where you put down those thoughts so that you can go back and reflect on them later. Then when you return to them, you can give them the nuance and consideration those thoughts deserve.

Blog as a workshop

We’ve all seen bloggers who have achieved fame and fortune by sharing their every thought with the world. Some of these blog spaces have been transformative places where people have found community with individuals who make them feel less alone, but the size of one’s blog audience rarely indicates the quality of the ideas or the quality of writing on that particular blog.

While yes, I do want a bigger blog audience and I do appreciate the likes and comments on each piece I write, seeing my blog as my public writing workshop space has transformed me as a writer and made me less anxious about my statistics.

I truly started to see my blog as a workshop when I challenged myself to write at least one blog post a week. I did that consistently for two years and that weekly practice made me a much better writer. I can look at the pieces that I wrote over that time and see how I changed, both in the flow of ideas and my word choice. Even with two degrees in English, my blog space made me into the writer that I am today.

My blog is where I started to see the importance of telling my own story. I started my first blog to write about our renovations on the foreclosure that we bought, but I quickly started sharing stories about parenting and travel. Eventually, I started writing about transitions in my faith and my understanding of politics. The better I got at telling these stories, the more I saw others connecting with my life as well. My story began to matter to my audience too, and gave me a foundation on which to write my first book.

It’s never too late

Many of us have become convinced that our dreams are over if we haven’t achieved them before we turn 40, but there are so many examples of writers who didn’t tell their stories until they were in middle age and beyond. J.R.R. Tolkien didn’t publish his first novel until he was 45. Laura Ingalls Wilder didn’t publish the Little House books until she was 65. Toni Morrison was almost 50 when she published her first novel, The Bluest Eye.

Even if you’ve never been published for the world to see, the writing you’ve done in secret matters. For years I would go through Mark Twain’s biography when I was teaching his work to my students and I would cringe when I thought of all that he had accomplished by the time he was in his mid-30s. Now that I’m in my mid-40s, I finally realize that experience matters. I am not the same writer now that I was 12 years ago as a graduate student. I am definitely not the same writer that I was 30 years ago when I was penning letters to friends across the country and writing down my darkest secrets in my journal. The years have given me perspective, enough wisdom to encourage my teenage daughter to keep writing but to keep her stories to herself, for now. I want her to know that her voice matters, but so does a little perspective once she has the drama of adolescence behind her.

My grandmother’s story matters to her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, as well as the many others who have been touched by her story over the last few years. Your story matters as well. So take up a pen and a notebook and start writing down notes. Start a blog and email your writing to your nearest and dearest. And then, when you are ready, start writing down the story inside of you, because it matters.

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