At a dinner party a few years ago, a man I had just met leaned across the table and told me, “You’re very powerful, you know.”
Sure, I thought. I can’t even get my teenager to put his sheets in the washer.
“Really,” he continued. “As a writer, you have a huge influence.”
True. I wrote promotional features – ads that pretend to be stories – for magazines and I was very good at it. Unfortunately, I didn’t like convincing people that they’d be happier if they erased their hard-earned wrinkles with Botox or doused the strands of tinsel in their hair. I’d rather use my skills for good: entertainment and enlightenment.
So I decided to collect a dozen or so essays I’d written about my family, got my dad to illustrate them, and self-published. I thought my relatives – the fodder, as I call them – would enjoy the stories. My cousin Barbara phoned when a copy landed in her mailbox.
“I-i-i-it’s beautiful,” she sobbed.
“Thank you,” I said. “I count the day well spent if I can make my loved ones cry.”
She blew her nose. “I laughed, then I cried, then I laughed again.”
Well that’s something, I thought.
Scientists have proven that laughter strengthens the immune system.
There’s one person who won’t catch a cold any time soon.
My Auntie Lois was next. “I love it!” she said. “I’m going to do the same thing for my daughters.”
Since my Auntie Lois calls me about once every…well, she’s never phoned me…I was thrilled. Isn’t that great! I thought. One more family handing its tales to the next generation.
I put the essays on a shelf and finished a novel, which alas the publishing world didn’t care for. But a friend asked if she could read it, so I handed over the manuscript. A couple of weeks later she handed it back, saying, “Thank you. I really enjoyed that.”
Well, what else could she say, right?
I filed it, wrote another novel that New York didn’t want, and my friend signed up for her very first bike tour.
“Cool!” I said, surprised. “What made you decide to do that?”
“Your book,” she said.
Now when I think that I’m never going to be good enough or that New York’s never going to get me, I remind myself that, even unpublished, my writing has changed lives. Including my own.
And now that he’s grown up and moved out, I wonder if the teenager would have done his laundry if only I’d written him a note….
Rachel Goldsworth
http://www.rachelgoldsworthy.blogspot.com
That is a wonderful story. I was reading Kathie Lee’s book and it she talked about sharing her personal pain with a Bishop and he put his arms around her and asked her to offer it up for others. And so she went to Washington and did something about underpaid workers. Anyway, that encouraged me to keep speaking out about an issue that’s important to me – fatherless daughters – and why I put my book “Myths of the Fatherless” on Kindle after retiring it, thinking I should be focusing on fiction only. Anyway, I think this relates to your blog post because your story validates sharing ourselves and our writing – it helps us and it helps others – even if we don’t make a big New York splash with it all. Thanks for sharing your story.
I just read “Using the Power for Good” and it really struck a chord for me. My sister Kathy is the only one who has read my two books and when she called me and said she cried when one of the characters got shot and was in a coma, “I” almost cried. That my book could evoke emotion in anyone was thrilling to me! I realized that was what I wanted – for someone to read what I’d written and for it to make someone FEEL something. Even though I’m still working on it and it definitely is what I just discovered a WIP means, and it may never make it onto ANY bookshelf but my own, it really moves ME when I write and that should count for something, eh?
Rachel, I love this. To make readers laugh and cry and laugh again is my ultimate goal. Don’t think I can do that with my life (which would bring snickers), so I’m sticking to fiction.
I think the man you met at the dinner party was right and you are very powerful.
Rachel, what a wonderful blog post. Thank you so much for sharing. My goal as a writer is to touch those who read my work, just as I have been touched countless times through my whole life by wonderful books.
Loved this post, Rachel, and your sense of humor. Here’s to hoping NY does “get” you soon, because I’d honestly like to read your work.
Great post! Thanks for reminding us all that NYT lists can be wonderful, but just as wonderful are those personal moments with those we love best.
Rachel – Now THAT was inspiring! If you keep at it, you
WILL be published. I know this, because this is why we read – to read something that reaches inside you and touches you in a way that makes you say, “I didn’t know anyone else felt that.”
Laura Drake
The hardest thing for me to do is to lay bare my own emotions and fears, my sense of inadequacy…but wait. That’s not it.
The hardest thing is to state out loud that I’m not completely inadequate. That maybe I have achieved my dream, albeit on a smaller scale.
Oh my gosh! Maybe we’re all successful!