Permission to Write

What does it mean to give yourself permission to write? If you want to write, you just write. Right? Unfortunately for some of us it’s not that simple.

The first time I encountered this idea of giving oneself “permission to write” was when I read Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott in the mid-1990s. I was in my late 20s working as a freelance journalist for The Los Angeles Times secretly yearning to write fiction. I’d always wanted to write creatively but worried I’d never be able to support myself or that I had no talent or both, so I pursued journalism because I would still be writing and hopefully making a difference in the world preferably while traveling in exotic locales like the journalist in the movie The Year of Living Dangerously. The reality was far different.

I was based in the San Gabriel Valley bureau and my days consisted of driving through smog choked freeways to cover a water board meeting, a teacher’s strike, a stabbing. At night I read Bird by Bird, underlining passages, scribbling notes in the margins, savoring each chapter as if it held the keys to the writing life I dreamed about. I needed encouragement and practical advice, which the book offers plenty of, but it also offers lots of humor which helped me to lighten up, something I also desperately needed because within six months of working at The Times, a fear began gnawing at me – I’d spent four years earning a degree for a career I was beginning to question. I knew I was lucky to be working at a great newspaper and I knew I had to pay my dues, but when I looked around the newsroom at the seasoned reporters who’d spent half their adult lives at The Times, they didn’t look happy to me. They were still writing stories about school board meetings and city council squabbles. They were not in the Rome bureau drinking espresso at sidewalk cafes or foreign correspondents covering coups in Indonesia. I worried I’d wind up like them, writing stories I didn’t want to write indefinitely.

At home I began attempting to write fiction, but everything wound up in the trash. I was an avid reader of fiction but had no idea how to actually write it. I’d start with a vague idea, an image, a snippet of conversation and rush to get it down but once I tried to turn these images and ideas into an actual story I was lost. The critical voices in my head started to whisper and I’d shut down the process before it was even off the ground.  

Bird by Bird approaches the process of writing as something that’s messy and frustrating, which was a relief, but I still couldn’t give myself permission to complete a story. The negative voices in my head always won out. Lamott says, “Writing is about hypnotizing yourself into believing in yourself, getting some work done, then unhypnotizing yourself and going over the material coldly.” I had to hypnotize myself because believing in myself did not come naturally.

When my bureau closed, I half-heartedly looked for another journalism job but when I couldn’t find one, I was secretly relieved. I would get an MFA and become a real writer! The problem was I had very little work to submit to a program and I still worried I’d never be able to support myself with a degree in creative writing, so I did the thing that seemed more practical, I earned an MA in English literature. I figured I could teach English and churn out novels during the summers – if I could give myself permission.

I’ve been an adjunct college English instructor for over twenty-five years now and have managed to write on the side: Short stories, a novel, then another novel. I’ve been giving myself permission to write but it hasn’t come easily or naturally. Hundreds (thousands?) of rejections have made it hard to keep believing in my work. When a new idea arrived, I’d turn my back on it because I didn’t want to push my luck too far. It was a miracle I’d managed to write as much as I had. If I started writing about every single idea that popped into my head, I might risk losing whatever permission I’d managed to give myself.  

This summer while revising my second novel for the umpteenth time I decided to reread Bird by Bird nearly 30 years after it was first published. I smiled at the passages I’d underlined as a young woman, passages that resonate even more with me now: “One of the things that happens when you give yourself permission to start writing is that you start thinking like a writer. You start seeing everything as material.”

I’ve always seen everything in my life as “material,” but I usually squashed the ideas because the voice in my head said, “That’s no good,” “Who would want to read that?” “You have papers to grade.” But I started to notice something while revising this novel I started ten years ago – I’ve stuck with it, writing day after day despite countless rejections, despite doubts and fears and annoying voices in my head. I’m writing. I’m a writer.

As I was hiking the other day, I thought about rereading Bird by Bird and how in those marked up pages I saw how much I’ve grown and how much I’m still the same. I felt that familiar burst of an idea but instead of brushing it aside, I came home and wrote it down.