"War and Noise"

for many writers, the problem isn't that we can't find "peace and quiet," it's that we think that is what we must have in order to write. (we don't.)

The following is a sort of response to the response re: last week’s newsletter — a post I wrote in a waiting room at Children’s Hospital. A post that resonated with many of you because I wrote it from that room. Because the energy in certain spaces makes for better — more honest — words. Because contrary to what you’ve been told, you do not need a quiet classroom or a home office or a six-week writer’s residency in a cabin or an MFA if you want to write. You just need a pen. And a life. And a desire to validate the human experience — within both your personal and peripheral narratives.

I have made my living, since my late teens, filtering the movement of this life through the stillness of my body. Because of this, my best work has been done on trains. And by that, I mean that my writing that resonates the most does so, not in spite of, but because of the cacophony that surrounds it; writer as eye of the storm.

And while I do not typically write about writing (I think this might be the first time I have?) I have spent the last year teaching/coaching adults and through that experience, have learned that so many adult writers are limiting themselves by the overwhelm of believing that there is something more to writing than naming truth over and over again — and, well, there isn’t. Not really. (The kids I have taught in the past seem to understand this innately. They do not have our fears and hang-ups. Most adults would benefit from taking writing classes from children and not the other way around!)

And while I agree with Virginia Woolf (whose name I have always been intimidated to share) that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”, ie ALL WOMEN NEED FREEDOM AND AUTONOMY if they are to WRITE HONESTLY, her words were not meant to be taken literally in terms of needing an ACTUAL room with a “writing desk” and “peace and quiet.” And that is what I would like to speak to today.