Becoming an Instrument

If Julia Cameron got me started, Anne L

amott keeps me going. In her inspired book Bird by Bird, Cameron says “Truth seems to want expression. Unacknowledged truth saps your energy and keeps you and your characters wired and delusional. But when you open the closet door and let what was inside out, you can get a rush of liberation and even joy.” Now I love that. I feel that if I find the truth and go from there, the writing becomes about giving. “There is no cosmic importance to your getting something published, but there is in learning to be a giver,” Lamott writes. That is what I do—I write to let others know what I know, so they can mull it over and find what their truth is. I have a mission. I try to choose my words so someone else will read it and think they never thought of it that way before. I live on faith that I write because I have to, that I have my own distinct and interesting voice, and I have something to say. If I devote myself to my writing, I can help someone else with their truth. Anne Lamott says, “The good news is that some days it feels like you just have to keep getting out of your own way so that whatever it is that wants to be written can use you to write it.” When the work takes over and I become an instrument, I’ve found what I was looking for, and so have my readers. As the story materializes, I find the truth, in my own plodding way, bird by bird.