Member-only story
We Write To Be Read
(or, at least, some of us do!)
I just got back from seeing The Wife, the amazing new Glenn Close movie. Yes, you should go see it. It was terribly relevant and terribly profound. I’m not going to spoil any of the details of the story, but there was one scene that shouted out to me.
An author’s reception in the library at Yale, 1960. At her professor’s urging, a young woman meets with the author, a jaded woman with a Bohemian air. The young woman has promise. And the author’s advice? Don’t do it.
She talks about fighting against the boys club, and doing all of the work of pushing through that, only to sell less than a thousand copies. And, to send the point home, she picks up a copy of her own book off the library shelf. The young writer opens it. You can hear the book crack; the sound of a book that’s never been opened before. “We write to be heard,” she says.
And God, if that isn’t the truth.
The movie touches in on the other aspects of writing: the misery, the rejection, the joy of writing of creating characters and losing yourself in them. The passion of taking this story, writing this thing that you urgently want to say, and putting it out there in the world.
You enjoy writing it. You love the process, even as hard and difficult and painful as it is. But, for…
