January | 2017 | Eye-Dancers

“Wow, I don’t know how I can compete with that,” she said. “That’s a tough act to follow!”

Jennifer, like everyone else in the class–a Creative Nonfiction Workshop–was a would-be writer, and, also like everyone else in the class, shared the same nervousness and reservations prior to a critique of her work.

Every week, we would read two essays, submitted by fellow Workshop students, and would then critique the essays during the next class. This particular class, held on a cold upstate New York November evening in the late 1990s, featured two essays that were very different in scope and tone. The first one, which we had just reviewed with glowing praise, was a ten-page tour de force of a young man’s experience backpacking through Europe the summer after he graduated from high school. It told, in clipped, precise prose, his adventures traveling through the small towns and rural beauty of France, his foibles in Paris, even a near-arrest in Switzerland. It was an engaging, oftentimes edgy, irreverent, and highly entertaining piece.

Jennifer’s essay, on the other hand, was quiet, short, and homey. It told of a stormy January day when she was six years old. She was home–school had been canceled due to the weather–and didn’t know what to do. Her brother was sick in bed, and her mom was in the kitchen baking chocolate chip cookies. So Jennifer joined her, asked if she could help with the baking. It was a day, she wrote, that on the surface appeared ordinary and run-of-the-mill. Baking cookies in a snowstorm? Not the stuff of blockbuster movies or prize-winning novels. But the experience left a lasting impression. She said she could close her eyes and return to that day, could still smell the sweet aroma of the cookies as they baked, the tender touch of her mom’s hand patting her on the shoulder. She said whenever she felt overwhelmed, unsure, scared of what the world might have in store, she would pause and reflect on that day in the kitchen, the windowpanes steaming up, the snow falling outside, softly.

But in the wake of the essay that had preceded hers, Jennifer felt intimidated. “I wish we’d have looked at my essay some other week,” she said to the class, eliciting a few laughs.

The professor, a tall woman with thick glasses who always wore her hair in a ponytail, took the moment to pursue the topic. “Why do you say that?” she said. “I don’t mean to preempt the class’s thunder, but I loved your essay. It moved me deeply.” This seemed to comfort Jennifer. She let out a relieved breath, her shoulders falling back, more relaxed.

“My story just seems so small,” she said then. “I mean, backpacking through Europe? Really? And I just write about baking some cookies with my mom.” She shook her head.

There was an uncomfortable silence, but then the professor said, “So, what’s wrong with small? I think there’s this old lie that says writers need to see the world, do all these incredible things, maybe save the planet a few times, and then write a masterpiece about all of it. But you know what? That’s not life for most people. Here, let’s take a poll. How many of you have climbed Everest?” A few murmurs, no hands. “Been to the moon? Dived in the Marianas Trench?” No one said a word. We just listened. “It’s the quiet moments, the little moments, we all have in common,” she went on. “As writers, we just need to share our stories. I think that’s the most important thing. No matter how ‘small’ your story is, let your voice be heard.”

I think that was the only time that semester our professor veered off topic quite like that. She normally was laser-focused on the essays themselves, without any editorializing. This just added weight to her words that day.

As I drove home after class, I knew that I would never forget.

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It’s easy to feel the way Jennifer did that day. I know I have, plenty of times. The old insecurities arise, threatening to sabotage the creative process and prevent the sharing of ideas. Questions and accusations are quick to malign and judge and condemn: What do I know? Who would want to read anything I write? Do I really have anything important or worthwhile to say? Why am I fooling myself? Who would listen to my advice or believe my characters or be interested in my stories?

It can be crippling if we let it.

And sometimes things happen, events take shape in the world around us–perhaps at the personal level, the local level, or maybe at the national or even global level–and we feel the need, the conviction to say something, do something, make some kind of meaningful difference. In the face of such a conviction, however, it is all too easy to succumb to the doubts. You are just one person, after all. One voice among billions . . .

And what do you even write, anyway? If you generally focus primarily on fiction, do you now need to scrap your “business-as-usual” projects and start crafting op-eds and social commentaries?

These are the sorts of questions I have asked myself more than once over the past few weeks. I am deeply concerned–troubled, even–about what 2017 will bring. And I admit–it has been hard to focus on fiction at times, hard to get lost in story and characters. I am thisclose to finishing the first draft of the sequel to The Eye-Dancers. And yet–is this novel I’m working on too small, too unimportant, just as my classmate worried her essay was twenty years ago?

But no. No, I don’t think it is. And when I feel as though I should be writing something else, blogging about something else, I stop, take a breath, and remind myself. Because though The Singularity Wheel is even more “out there” than The Eye-Dancers is, and though it features parallel worlds and quantum mechanics and a weird intergalactic virus that can snuff the protagonists right out of existence, it also, it is my hope, explores themes and ideas that are universal and enduring–themes like discovery, friendship, our connection to the universe and each other, understanding, and love. And in the climate of 2017, when so many are so divided by so much, these are themes worth writing about.

So I write. I write. And I hope you will, too. One voice becomes two, which in turn becomes four, and it expands exponentially, rising in pitch, impossible to ignore.

When that nagging inner critic tries to sabotage your attempts and tells you to deep-six your efforts, that what you have to say is too “small” and lacks the scope to make a difference in a world so much in need of healing, fight back. Write that story. Craft that article or poem. Post that blog. And realize that your truth, your message, your courage to speak out and speak up is like a ripple in a pond, spreading and multiplying. And inspiring others to join you.