Writing to understand, writing to be understood.

I am struggling with my resolutions. Part of me feels the slow beginnings of a good routine, but part of me chides, “You have next to nothing show for almost a month of trying to be more creative. You suck, and I knew you would suck.” (Oh, the wisdom of self-fulfilling prophecies.)

I have written. I’m about half-way to my target of 10,000 words for the month, and if this exercise in creativity is anything like college, I’ll probably always be writing at least 5,000 words the night before the new month. I make deadlines just so I can enjoy the thrill of pushing myself up against them.

But I can’t help but feel like I should have built in some training wheels for these resolutions. And because it’s too late to change the rules, I have to seek other supports. This weekend I resorted to watching Little Women, which is the quintessential Emily cry for help when I want to write but am too scared, distracted, or defeated to start.

Little Women came out when I was starting to realize that writing, an activity I loved, could actually be an identity. Watching it again this weekend, I realized Little Women fed all the emerging parts of my identity when I first saw it… beyond the craft of writing, it appealed to my curiosity about humanity and equality, my sense of family, and my pursuit of meaning in such a big world. (Little Women came out in 1994. I was a very serious 10 year old.)

Knowing more of who I am now, and knowing why writing still matters to me, I was struck by a thread of the story my inexperienced 10-year-old self didn’t totally appreciate. Early on, Jo claims the most important part of writing is writing what you don’t know.

Admittedly, in my urge to latch on to any kind of direction right now with my writing, I thought, “Aha! I will write something I know nothing about. It would be easy to write 10,000 words every month if I did that.”

I forgot a major part of the story is Jo discovering that her own story, of her sisters and her life, is the most powerful thing she brings to her writing. After all, the movie culminates with her writing Little Women and getting it published. Yeah, duh. This quickly put my epiphany about writing what I don’t know back in perspective.

So now I’ve been thinking about what it is I do know. I get myself tangled up in the expectation that my writing must dutifully package and present some kind of nugget. I too often end up writing as a service to progress. When I think about writing what I know, I’m actually asking, What do I have that I can package? As if I am a grocery store, and if I just wheeled a cart around, I could fill it with the contents of my mind and apply them with the kind of rigor that produces a polished three-course meal.

Yet writing is not so precise an exercise, at least not for me. Writing what you know shouldn’t equate to identifying and exploiting life experience. In all likelihood, part of my fear of getting started is actually the messiness. I’m looking at a pile of experiences and questions – good and bad – and wondering how the hell I’m going to transform it into something I can stomach.

So I decided I am going to worry a little less about writing what I know and what I can package. Instead, I want to write to understand, rather than writing to be understood.

I think this is why Jo March’s/Louisa May Alcott’s experiences became so powerful. It was not simply that she had lived them, but she had reached a point in her life where she needed to understand them. She could lend herself to them more as a student and less as a curator of them.

This thinking has led me to three conclusions:

• I should put aside the draft of the children’s story I was working on – it’s a convenient way for me to hide from the things I still need to understand, and the experiences I need to be writing.
• I need to recommit myself to writing poetry, because that is the one kind of writing that has always helped me tap into my experiences.
• I need to get over the fact that one of my college professors essentially told me I’m the world’s worst essayist and just start writing some personal essays… I never exactly thought she was God’s gift to writing anyway, so it’s silly to let her hold me back.

I have little idea where I’m going to start, but I think this is still helpful process?