WordSisters

I wrote my first novel when I was 10, in a royal blue spiral notebook I’m sure was meant for my math homework. The story was what you might expect of someone that age. The protagonist was an angst-ridden fifth grader whose family didn’t understand her.

I have other notebooks from those days, mostly filled with bad rhyming poetry and rants about my sisters. But the blue notebook is gone. I think, but I don’t know for certain, that I destroyed it in a fit of frustration. This was long before Anne Lamott wrote Bird by Bird, and I understood the value and necessity of a shitty first draft. I just thought I was a bad writer because I couldn’t resolve the plot in a meaningful way. I was 10.

Since then, I’ve written pages and pages, too many words to count. More bad, unpublished poetry. An op-ed about athletes getting more recognition than scholars that was published in the Midland Daily News when I was in high school. A speech that won an award from Optimist International.

After high school I channeled my writing energy into professional writing: news releases, promotional copy, employee newsletters. I don’t remember much creative prose in the early days of my career, but most of my jobs involved writing.

Years later, driving home from a family reunion in Barnesville, Minnesota, my two kids and my mom strapped in the back of our minivan, I decided to go to graduate school for creative writing. There I became the writer I always dreamed I’d be.

I spent the next seven years learning about the craft I’ve loved since I was 10. I was introduced to Anne Lamott, Joan Didion, Janet Burroway, and a host of others who helped me learn that writing is a process and a passion. Sometimes the words flow easily and land on the page perfectly formed. Most of the time, however, it’s a wrestling match, moving words around until they strike the perfect pose or are pinned to the page in beautiful submission.

Now, two decades later, I turn to Julia Cameron, who encourages me more than any of the others to just write. Every day. In a notebook. Longhand.

***

I go to my local office supply store (some still exist post-pandemic, although my favorite has closed) and shop for two notebooks. I pick a college-ruled notebook for my daily pages. I want a different color for the novel I’m going to write. This will be my third novel if you count the abandoned manuscript from childhood. I rifle through the messy piles in the bins of the store searching for the perfect one. I stack the notebooks neatly back on the shelves, turning them right side out until at the bottom of the bin I find it. I can’t say why it’s “the one,” but it is.

I clutch the two notebooks to my chest and head to the cash register. I lay the two side-by-side on the counter, marveling at the possibilities. The black cover will be for my morning pages. And the other—the one with the vaguely familiar royal blue cover—will hold the novel I’m about to begin.