Writing as a Creative Act
Keynote address at the 1991 Young Author's Conference, Westchester Community College

Good morning. Thank you, Ruth Townsend and Leslie Anderson for inviting me to address this group of young writers today. While I have given many speeches before, I feel differently about this speech today. Because all of the members of the audience are writers, I truly feel as if I am one of you and I want to talk to you from my heart. I'd like to talk to you about my feelings regarding the writer's path to self discovery and my own personal trip along that path. I'd also like to talk about some of the elements that form the backdrop of the writer's life., i.e. creativity, daydreaming, imagination, self awareness and self criticism.

I grew up in Sumter, South Carolina. Sumter is a small town whose name has recently been in the news because it is also the home of Shaw Air Force Base and this coming Sunday, President Bush will visit Shaw Field as we used to call it to welcome troops home from Operation Desert Storm. When I was a high school journalist, I had hopes that Sumter would gain fame as the home of Sarah White. That has not yet happened, but I still have hope.

I can remember all to well sitting where you are now sitting. It was 1962. I was a junior in high school, and editor-in-chief of my school newspaper. I had come to New York, along with high school journalists from across the United States, to attend the Columbia Scholastic Press Conference. Edward R. Murrow, the doyen of would-be journalists, spoke at one of the events which was held at Overseas Press Club.

Now to me, a starry eyed girl, that was the big time. Edward Murrow told us "the sky was the only limit for our dreams."  Mr. Murrow was the first person who told me I could be a writer and he had never read anything I had written, but I believed him. It felt right with my soul. The next year, another young woman and I were selected to write a five minute report of events at our high school and broadcast it over a local radio station. I was in hog-heaven. That event made it okay for me to ask questions and as I asked questions, I honed my skills as a journalist.

A year later, upon my graduation from high school, I wrote "The sky's the limit" on the page in my yearbook marked "Dreams" and set off for college. There, the rudiments of language rather than the beauty of its expression became the focus of my studies. I became an English major and imitated the "masters." Who I was, what I experienced, and what I thought were no longer considered good enough. I aspired to be like the French short story writers, Balzac and Flaubert or the Americans, Hawthorne, Poe, Melville and Cather. And I failed. So I stopped trying. I was afraid to trust what was inside me. My own personal critic reared her head and battered me into submission.

The writer Kalil Gibran wrote these words:

Your heart knows in silence
the secrets of the days and nights
But your ears thirst
for the sound of your heart's knowledge.
You would know in words
that which you have always known in thought
You would touch with your fingers
the naked body of your dreams.

I had the dream but I didn't know how to express it. Words are the medium through which we translate our experiences and I had to find words to express who I was and where I had come from. I had to explore my past and this was a painful task. First, I probed internally; then, I made the personal universal. My ever vigilant critic reared his head because he knew my fragile ego, my founded and unfounded fears. He remembered verbatim every negative comment I had ever received about my work; but he forgot every word of praise I had received. I found that I could sedate the critic for brief spells while I wrote poetry. So I concentrated on writing poetry.

In response to the frequently asked question of why I write, I composed a very simple poem as an answer.

Laughter, joy, pain and sorrow

are all emotions that seduce my pen

and inspire it to act as scribe for my heart.

I must feel; therefore, I must write.

This is no mean task

which my heart must perform.

It is an obligation incurred in my childhood

and renewed at each milestone I encounter.

Like magic, my pen moves.

Like water, the words flow.

my head becomes the computer,

my heart the programmer,

my hand the tool.

And the message is set down on paper

As proof that the feeling existed somewhere.

I composed that poem along with many of the others in my first book of poetry because I was in personal crisis and professional psychiatric help was out of range of my budget; so, I took to recording the feelings I was experiencing. Recently, I read an article in the New York Times that said new studies suggest that people who are able to write about their inner thoughts and feelings may enjoy better mental and physical health. They should have asked writers. We could have told them long ago. But, the interesting thing is that once I began to feel better, I didn't want to stop writing. I had found the language to convey my feelings; I had grown fond of painting pictures on lined yellow pads.

The world around me had caught my attention and I began to have a response to what I saw, and I believed that my response was valid. I listened to the way people talked and I listened to what they said. I took to sitting alone in restaurants and listening to the conversations of people at nearby tables. I began to imagine what the people they talked about looked like. I began to dredge up memories from my past ... people I knew in childhood, high school, college and tried to capture their nuances on paper.

When I passed people on the street, I tried to describe them on paper with words. I painted pictures but without paint and oils. I found the language of my expression. For some writers, form and shape precede their actual writing; for others, a visual presentation is the commencement; for others like me, characters present themselves and grow into full fledged people whose lives interact and provide plot outlines.

How many people here today have thought something you've written was absolutely wonderful?? Let's see a show of hands.... Anything at all -- from a letter to a poem to a story. And how many have thought something you've written was absolutely terrible? For dedicated writers, the truth lies someplace between the two. We all constantly quarrel with the critic inside ourselves. The critic says not only must we produce, but we must be recognized as world class, win prizes an acclaim. (Pulitzer, Nobel, be reviewed in the NYT, hit the best sellers list, have our photo on the cover of Time or People, a la Scott Turov or Tom Wolfe.

The production of something does not make you an artist. The soul makes you an artist. An artist is an artist before he or she has produced a single thing. If you believe yourself an artist, you will find the tools to express what you feel. Musician try a broad range of musical instrument; painters try pencil, ink, watercolor, oil, acrylic, clay, marble; writers try poetry, short stories, plays, screenplays. I wanted to be a painter but because I could not accurately duplicate the human face or specific animals, I was not encouraged to paint and did not believe myself an artist; thus, I stopped trying to draw with pencil and paint brush. I never developed my talent for artistic design and layout. I was an artist looking for a medium of expression. Then I enrolled in an "Early bird" journalist's class. Suddenly, I was seized by the muses of writing. I began to tell stories...I began to draw pictures with words. I was ecstatic. I truly felt creative.

In the '60s the phrase "use it or lose it" was often repeated. I repeat it today because it is still a truth. Use your creativity or lose your creativity! Creativity has many avenues. Just living our lives can cultivate our conscious creativity. When we participate fully in the process of our lives, we discover new forms of our creative self. (Ann Wilson Schaef)

Nothing can replace creativity in our lives -- not work, not love, not children, nothing. There is no substitute for creativity which is usually tapped when we are alone. Our creative impulses must find their own avenue for expression. (AWS). Our creativity, once unleashed, knows no time or space. It is like a passionate lover who demands to be heard immediately. "Baby Mamas", a poem in my book, Feelings Brought To Surface, was written one morning on my way to work. I scribbled it on a napkin as I sat on the steps of Maryland National bank in downtown Baltimore, Maryland.

When our creativity shows itself, it is now, au courant. The ideas that we have are a result of who we are now, our life situations now, and what is going on inside us now. Once I began to write, every story I read or someone told to me took on a special significance. I tried to find words to tell the story even better; to make the character more vivid, more real, realer than real.

A writer's inside world creates his or her outside world. For the writer, life stories are the equivalent of flowers to a perfume manufacturer -- raw material. In and of themselves, they may be beautiful, but when they are processed -- reworked with other ingredients -- they become evocative, provocative extraordinarily heady scents that travel in glass bottles across oceans and evoke memories years after they are applied.

The connection between our inner richness, our self concept and our work will give us a quiet peace and confidence. It isn't as important for the world to claim your work as it is for you to claim your work for yourself. Your writing is good! Trust your gut! The mere fact that you are here today says that not only are you able to write, but that you are good because your work has caught the attention of at least one reader and now is a time to celebrate that you have found a way to convey emotions on paper.

A child is born "tabula rasa" -- with no experience -- and spends the rest of its life forming and recalling memories. The novelist Nicholas Delbanco has remarked that by the age of four, one has experienced nearly everything one needs as a writer of fiction: love, pain, loss, boredom, rage, guilt, fear of death. What does that child do with those memories? 1. Hold them? (consciously or subconsciously). 2. Tell them? or 3. write them down?

Daydreaming is an example of holding your memories. It is that period just before sleep when we review our own personal memories or press our thoughts to their furtherest limits of what could be. For writers and other artists, it is a fertile time. Everyone has heard someone who has the "gift of gab" regale friends and family with stories. But you, as writers, have chosen to record your memories on paper (or computer disks). Your memories can transcend time and space. You can make marks on paper which when read a thousand miles away, one hundred years later will still convey the spirit of your thoughts.

What does the decision to write down your memories entail? The writer's business is to make up convincing human beings and create for them basic situations and actions by means of which they come to know themselves and reveal themselves to the reader. It is by reading and training that one learns to present one's fiction. Not imitation, but finding out from the work of others what techniques work. Mastery is the writer's constant goal. As a corollary to the old joke, "How do you get to Carnegie Hall?" I ask, " How do you become a successful writer?" The answer to both questions is the same: Practice, practice, practice.

I'm sure many of you have heard "California Dreaming" by the Mamas and Papas. Well the Mamas and Papas are from California and one day while they were in New York on tour, they felt homesick and wrote that song -- while looking out their hotel window at Central Park. They took a personal experience and turned it into a universally symbolic experience. They could have just returned to California; instead they used the tools of their trade -- words and music -- to express what they felt.

It's easy to feel, but difficult to capture our feelings -- at least most of the time. The very talented who have no perseverance or sense of self become failures in the wasteland surrounding the oasis called successful writers. Who stands guard at the gate of successful writing, you ask? My answer is you do. Not only must you read a lot, listen a lot and write a lot. You must be free and play. Hold on to the childlike aspects of your nature: openness, inquisitiveness. Don't be afraid to live your life in the world. Debbie Gibson is experiencing a creative crisis in her life because she is aging chronologically, but not experiencing the ordinary events of life that feed creativity. Her audience -- 20 year old young women like herself -- have fallen into and out of love. They have dealt with leaving home and going to college or joining the work force. They have experienced failure and risen above it. Self reliance and decision making are facts of life for them. By the mere circumstances of her success, Debbie has not undergone this normal metamorphoses. She has been sheltered from life and living. She herself admits that she has not had a serious boyfriend. Thus, the well from which she expresses her creativity is no longer relevant to the people who originally bought her records. So her popular appeal wanes and her latest album has failed to produce multiple hit records.

Creativity also requires quiet, and an uninterrupted stretch of time -- time for yourself with no agenda, no deadlines, no needs of others impinging upon us. Time to play and imagine what could be. Time to look at the world and reflect.

Young writers are advised to read, listen, write and wait. Reading and listening imprint you and give you material for the expression of your creativity. They are the real tools of your trade. It doesn't matter whether you write on yellow legal pads, in spiral bound notebooks, with pencils or pens, on Apple or IBM computers... All that matters is you write -- every day if at all possible. I have manipulated every job I ever had into utilizing my skills as a writer and writing is a talent that is improved, not depleted, by use. I am amazed at the sacrifices I have made in order to be a writer and have not felt that they are sacrifices. For me, writing has been a series of leavings in order to pursue the muse that beckoned.

Thirteen years ago, my family was distressed when I quit my "good job" and moved to New York to be near the publishing industry and other writers. I took a job working for a consulting firm which permitted me to use their computer equipment after work for my personal writing. I wrote from 6 - 9 PM, four evenings per week and for five hours either on Saturday or Sunday. I wrote short stories, children's stories, fairy tales, science fiction... I tried my hand at everything in order to make the transition from journalist to novelist.

One Christmas, I took a trip back to South Carolina -- a place I had not seen since I left in 1963 to attend college in Baltimore. I had no love for the south and never missed it or understood my parent's love of it. Yet, when I went back to visit, my past became a living part of my present. It gave me a handle on a particular place in time. I began to use my southern background as the locale for several of my short stories. I returned to New York and began to write about my trip south. I was surprised that as I wrote about my trip, it awakened feelings I had forgotten.... feelings I began to incorporate into characters in my stories. One evening around 8, as I worked alone in my office, I heard glass tinkling and went out to see what was going on -- as ever, the inquisitive child -- and walked into a burglary in progress. I saw the burglar before he saw me and I ran into my office and locked the door.

I phoned the police and in the thirteen minutes I huddled under a desk, waiting for their arrival, I evaluated my life. I realized that I wasn't ready to die. There were things left I had not accomplished. I wanted my books to be required reading in the college syllabus fifty years from now and I had not yet completed my first novel. Two months later, I retired from the world of 9 - 5 and entered a world where I worked constantly. I set out to write a murder mystery, but after a few chapters, a southern character ( a young man) tapped on my computer screen and demanded that I let him out and I did. That character evolved into an entire book which I am now in the proces of completing. I have sedated my critic and feel that my work is moving along satisfactorily. I have an agent who feels the same way.

For a long time, my answering machine said "I'm sorry I can't take your call, but the Muses have me hard at work" and I still feel like that. I am amazed by the images in my mind that I struggle to record in words. I am amazed that more keep coming. I can't seem to keep up -- the well seems to be bottomless and it is. I am amazed that the very act of living in the world fuels what I do. An interruption by a UPS delivery person results in my observing an unusual character trait which I can attach to a minor character. That one small item helps to make the character real.

It is as if my mind is filled with a storehouse of characters, settings, plots and it is my job as the writer to sort and select the appropriate ones. By living my life, I am put in touch with the appropriate stimuli. There seems to be a limited number of subject in the writers world and much of it has been done before. However, it is what the writer brings to the subject matter that makes his rendition memorable.

Writers are viewed as possessing very special talent. When you tell people you are a writer, they have one of several reactions: 1. their eyes grow wide and they say "I have a story that would make a great book" (and my answer is your story can only be told by you. I don't have the same emotion about it that you do and without that spark, your story will fall flat.)  2. their eyes grow wide and you can almost see them thinking about how much money you probably make for doing something so easy. I don't bother to tell them that the average writer earns $10,000 per year. 3. they say with a touch of awe in their voices, I could never be a writer. It's too hard. 4. or they say, "you must be very disciplined." Whenever I hear the last statement, I always smile inside, because it is the closest to the truth. Writing is 20% talent and 80% discipline or perseverance. You may never be another Hemingway, but you certainly can become a saleable author. I once had a schoolteacher friend who decided to become a writer on the basis of two books she had read, both by the same author. The first book was terrible, but when she read the second book, the writer's competence had improved to the point where she actually enjoyed reading the book. My friend figured that if she worked at it, she too could become a writer. And she did.

Daily, writers must steel themselves against the beckoning lure of the real world: sunshiny days, rainy days, trips to the post office, the grocery store, the movies, the mall, visits with friends, with dentists, with life in general. Writers must be willing to persevere with what at times is a boring occupation... boring because it is done best in isolation. Boring because after you've written the piece, be it a poem, essay, short story, long story or novel, you have to go back and re-write. You have to make certain that what you meant to say is written on the page. You must make sure that you have not presumed certain knowledge by the reader. You must ascertain that the reader will not be distracted by errors made in haste. Always you must be faithful to your muse. If you are, it will be faithful to you.

Now, as I look back at Edward R. Murrow's words - the sky's the limit for your dreams, I think -- what a corny statement, but what a true statement. My dream of writing has no security, no assurances, no promises, but I know nothing else that could give me the kind of satisfaction, during the process of its accomplishment, that writing does. I still pursue my dream and will continue to do so until the day I die. I have no choice. That's how dreams are, they possess us. They sustain us. They give meaning to our lives.