\u00a0<\/p>\n
WHY DO I WRITE?<\/p>\n
I was five years old, sitting cross-legged on the beige and green
shag carpeting in our living room, scribbling in my Cinderella coloring book.\u00a0It was a stormy day in January and the cast iron radiators were spitting and\u00a0hissing. Icicles jutted down from the eaves of the roof, solidified in midair.\u00a0A hush had fallen over the city and all I could hear was the mechanical roar of\u00a0a snowplow.<\/p>\n
I looked around at my family. My parents were sitting in matching
upholstered chairs, reading the newspaper, hypnotically handing sections to\u00a0each other and dropping them into a pile on the floor. My older sister was\u00a0sitting in a tan easy chair, writing a book report on Treasure Island. I felt like the odd girl out as I scanned the crowded bookshelves that climbed from floor to ceiling. I wanted to read and write like my big sister did. I was hungry for the adventures that were hidden in those pages, just waiting for me to discover.<\/p>\n
When I learned to read in the first grade, my mother and I visited
our local library every day and I devoured the entire children\u2019s section. Since\u00a0then, books have offered me solace, richness, surprises and magic. I can\u2019t\u00a0imagine my childhood without Alice in Wonderland, Charlotte\u2019s Web, and The\u00a0Secret Garden. Who would I be without Scarlett O\u2019Hara from Gone With the\u00a0Wind? What if I hadn’t met Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy from Little Women or Hester Prynne from The Scarlet Letter? These books taught me about love, connection, isolation, morality, good and evil, what it means to be a friend, and the consequences of lying.<\/p>\n
When I started to write, I wasn\u2019t any good at it. In fact I sucked\u00a0but I never stopped to think about that. I didn’t show my writing to anyone so\u00a0I didn’t get any feedback. I didn’t build up expectations or suffer trauma and\u00a0criticisms. No one encouraged me but no one discouraged me either. When I got\u00a0home from school, I\u2019d sit on the little red cane chair in my bedroom, notebook\u00a0in my lap, and I\u2019d write because I wanted to. I did it every day, not because I\u00a0thought I should. Not because I wanted to build stamina or get approval. I
didn’t consider becoming a writer when I grew up. I just wrote and I liked it\u00a0so I kept on doing it. I see now that keeping my writing to myself was a good\u00a0idea. I didn\u2019t get steered in any particular direction. I just left myself\u00a0alone and watched the words appear on the page.<\/p>\n
One day, it was 1971, I sat down and to write and what came out
amazed me. It didn’t suck. At least I didn\u2019t think so. I’d been bored that day\u00a0and I\u2018d scribbled words that tuned into the following poem:<\/p>\n
Little Miss Mottleby\u00a0sits by the shelf,<\/p>\n
She picks up a\u00a0mirror and stares at herself.<\/p>\n
She sees two glass\u00a0eyes and some long flowing hair\u00a0<\/p>\n
A very large mouth\u00a0and some white hands, a pair.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
She wonders whatever\u00a0she\u2019s sitting there for.<\/p>\n
She\u2019d leave but in\u00a0her house there isn\u2019t a door.<\/p>\n
She\u2019d eat but there\u00a0seems not to be any food.<\/p>\n
She\u2019d cry but\u00a0decides that she\u2019s not in the mood.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Perhaps one day\u00a0soon, she\u2019ll just stand up and shout<\/p>\n
About animals,\u00a0feelings and good sauerkraut.<\/p>\n
For now, it suffices\u00a0to just sit and brood<\/p>\n
About having glass\u00a0eyes, about having no food.<\/p>\n
Decades later, when I began to teach, I wondered, What are a
writer\u2019s recurring blocks? How can we learn to tap into a friendly wave length\u00a0that can transform their inner critic from a demanding ogre into an encouraging\u00a0fairy godmother? How can I show my students a way to play on the page like I\u00a0did with my poem, Little Miss Mottleby? How could I help them go deeper once\u00a0they finished their first draft? How can I help them get into the writing zone?<\/p>\n
When you make it there, you know it. You\u2019re in your own private
world where you make up the rules, you define the boundaries, you stay there as\u00a0long as you like and you leave whenever you want. You are judge and jury. You\u00a0decide who is welcome and who is not, who is guilty and who is innocent. No one\u00a0gets to add or subtract anything without first getting permission from you. \u00a0<\/p>\n
How often does it occur that you\u2019re the sole creator of your own
reality? Whether you feel ecstatic or intimidated, whether you\u2019re drawing,\u00a0painting singing, dancing or writing, remember that the reward is in the\u00a0doing. There\u2019s no telling if your creation will find a home other than your\u00a0own, whether it\u2019ll become a blockbuster bestseller or end up on the remainders\u00a0table. Just do it for its own sake and see what happens. When you stop second\u00a0guessing yourself and your abilities, when you forget about good or bad or
comparing yourself to anyone else, the world of creation can be a safe haven, a\u00a0place to feel welcome, an outlet to express your emotions and an escape hatch\u00a0when the world around you seems overwhelming.<\/p>\n
These are the reasons that I write.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0 WHY DO I WRITE? I was five years old, sitting cross-legged on the beige and greenshag carpeting in our living room, scribbling in my Cinderella coloring book.\u00a0It was a stormy day in January and the cast iron radiators were spitting and\u00a0hissing. Icicles jutted down from the eaves of the roof, solidified in midair.\u00a0A hush […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":2151,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2152","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2152","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2152"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2152\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2153,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2152\/revisions\/2153"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2151"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}