This Writer's Manifesto

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I write. 

I have to tell you it has not been an easy trip. I have had a lot of discouragement and encouragement throughout the years, by various people in critical moments in my life that are forever crystalized in my brain. 


Like Mrs. Longfellow, my eighth grade Literary Arts teacher who after reading and grading one of my papers told me I should be an actress and speak someone else’s words, because I was no writer. 


Ouch. 


Mr. Chaney, a man who was a long-term substitute for my English teacher in ninth grade turned that around when he held me after class one day.

Typically I was only held after class because I had been a royal pain in the rear, snarky child that I was, and I thought I was in trouble. When he pulled out my paper on Romeo and Juliet, he said I had talent, and he felt I would be good at UIL Ready Writing. 


This blew my mind, but it was a moment I will never forget. Someone saw something in me: something good, something worth developing, something I thought was dross, but was really un-mined gold.  

Not Everyone Got It

When I came home and told my dad, who wrote (rather good) poetry in college, what Mr. Chaney had said, he was surprised and told me so. Daddy had always followed the philosophy that if you were not well spoken you could not be a good writer. Since I was fifteen, and a typical teenager who used too much slang, I can understand his point now, but then I was devastated. 


In my brain I heard you aren’t smart enough, you aren’t really talented, this was a fluke and you know that Mr. Chaney is a weirdo anyway. Rather unfair to Mr. Chaney and the beginning of a battle I have even now with insecurities about writing, which make me want to quit on a regular basis.

Besides any insecurity I may have, the other facet of writing that I find both extremely challenging and rewarding is its honesty. When done right, honest moments and honest words capture images that translate into memorable literary pictures in a reader’s mind. Once, I wrote about my favorite place in the world, more specifically I wrote about leaving it.

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“I learned the roads to home by driving away from it, with my father at the wheel and my step-mother resting her socked feet on the dash. The front window held the impression of her foot in fog; whether from the smell or the heat, I don’t know. Pressing my face against my door window, I watched the pine trees thin out and the road speed up, as we drove out of the hills into the flat emotionally barren world of the gulf coast of Texas.” 

These very honest sentences written by a then 17 year old version of me were met by praise for their imagery by Mrs. Henkies, my 11^th grade English teacher, but were met by hostility at home because they offended my parents. I have since learned why writers say we write what we know, because what we know is honest, what we know is both a gold mine and a landfill, what we know is organic.

So What Does That Mean? 

Am I a good writer? I do not think so. I am no Hemmingway, I am not Frost. I will not capture the attention of the world by writing about sparkling vampires in fields of flowers, but I am a writer. I write what I know.

I have known pain and I have known health. 


I have known heartache and I have known joy. 


I have known desperation and I have known peace. 


I have been lost, and I have been found. 


I write what I know. I write about life, I write about family, I write about emotions, I write about Jesus, because I know Him. 

So I will write, and I will act, Mrs. Longfellow. I will act out other writers’ words from the Bible, and I will write about those acts. I will write about the struggle of writing and I will remember that without the struggle the triumph would not mean as much. I am a writer. I write.

What are you?