Our children have just “graduated” from preschool. Because of that, I’m a little tender-hearted toward the families with children slightly younger than ours are now. Just the other day, as I drove past the park to pick up my kids from one of their last days at preschool, I watched a mother and child walk toward the little kids part, their gate slow and the mother’s focus concentrated on the wobbly narrator next to her. I’m pretty sure the sun was close to setting and a honey-like haze settled over them. Or maybe that was just my pre-nostalgia.
In any case, I continued on to pickup my kids and asked them, as usual, how their day went. The stories were nothing more than bits and pieces of a far more complicated day. I asked them if they remembered something from the year before, about a teacher. They sort of did. And it occurred to me then that I have spent years now, having intimate, engaged conversations with people who will never remember them.
The honey-haze slipped from my memory of the mother walking with her young child.
What does it mean, I wondered, to have conversations that meant (and mean) so much to me and to have no one but me remember them? What is the value of a conversation? Is it the content? Is it the emotion shared? Is it how it made me feel to focus on my children in that way?
The question is central to all communication and for people engaged with young children or brain injury that destroys memory or other brain illnesses, we struggle with the value of the impermanent connection. And in a strange way, it is the same question many new writers have about work that doesn’t get published.
What is the value of a story that nobody reads? Isn’t the whole point of writing to be read? Yes and no. To ease the burn of desire for publication, we can look at the model of talking with young children. It really is a joy to talk with them and to learn from them an unexpected word construction, to see how easily they play with time, space, and meaning.
When you look back in your drawer, with its short story that no one wanted to buy, or the novel or play or screenplay that took you years to get to a point where you could just barely fit it in your drawer, don’t focus on who didn’t buy it. Think instead what you learned about writing from your time together. Savor the private intimacy that no one but you will hold on to. Giggle a little at the way the story kept veering toward the unbelievable.
Now for the hard part, look at that story and find the things that make you proud that are perhaps remedial to you now. The way that one sentence sweeps across topic like the first time a child learns to pump on a swing.
Accept your child and writing for where it is right now, watch how it grows and when you get up to receive the Man Booker or the Pulitzer or the National Book Award, savor those private times and stories from so long ago that only you know.
What is your favorite “growing pain” from your work today?
Angie Powers has an M.F.A. in English and Creative Writing from Mills College, where she won the Amanda Davis Thesis Award for her novel, The Blessed. She also has a Certificate in Screenwriting from the Professional Programs at UCLA. She is the co-director and co-writer of the short Little Mutinies (distributed by Frameline and an official selection of the Palm Springs International Short Fest) and was a quarter-finalist for the Nicholl Fellowship and at Blue Cat Screenplay Competition for the full-length screenplay of Little Mutinies. She’s twice made it into the second round of consideration for Sundance Labs and is a Cinestory semi-finalist this year. She also wrote and directed the short Hot Date, which premiered at Frameline. She is currently finishing a new novel and a short film.