By Jessi Waugh
We sat together at a bistro table in a one-hundred-year-old building, during the monthly writer meet-up. It was intermission time – an opportunity to order wine, socialize, or run away before the prompt writing and critiques began. Sensing her imminent escape, I struck up a conversation with the woman across from me.
“Hi, I’m Jessi, the group’s secretary,” I said. “Is this your first meeting?”
“It is. I’m Erika, nice to meet you. But I need to leave soon. I can’t stay long,” she said.
Called it.
Erika was in her forties, dressed casually with a touch of bohemian, her body language nervous, her expression wary. She wasn’t sure if she belonged. She was dipping one toe into the pool to see if she wanted to swim; I threw her an inner tube.
“We’re glad to have you,” I said. “Thanks for coming. What kind of writing do you do? Short stories? Essays? Poetry? A book?” I used my Mister Rogers voice, the one that soothes preschoolers and wild horses. I leaned in to create a safe bubble for our conversation amid the burble of a dozen chatty writers.
“Oh, I’m not really a writer,” Erika said.
She sounded just like me, years ago, at my first meet-up.
“Of course you are,” I said.
“OK. Well, I’ve been writing – I don’t even know the right word for it – creative nonfiction? Like memoir? About my life?”
I nodded. “Yes, memoir, creative nonfiction; those are the right words. I do that, too. Do you post on a blog, or submit anywhere?”
“No, no,” Erika said with a shake of her head. “I just started a few months ago. But I don’t think I’m any good at it. I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know how to write.” Her head dropped, and she looked sad.
Ah. I knew the feeling precisely and shared the same insecurities: I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m not any good. I’ll never be a great writer.
Like when I finished my first short story and showed it to my MFA friends, who kindly told me it was awful. “The Cave” was pretentious, hard to follow, and who needs a retelling of Plato’s allegory? They were right, I realized – it was bad, and I didn’t know how to make it better.
Yet I had loved crafting that story. Should I continue writing, even if I was atrocious at it?
The answer came from an unexpected source, a National Geographic Magazine article about Sun City, a retirement community in Arizona. Kendrick Brinson, the story’s photographer and a self-proclaimed perfectionist, was moved when she observed residents trying painting, sports, dancing, and other activities for the first time, embracing new interests without self-judgement.
“I realized that I don’t have to be great, or even good, at something. I can just like the way it feels,” Brinson wrote.
Those words resonated with me, and I’ve repeated them many times since.
In addition to being a writer, I’m also a yoga teacher. Often, I have new students in class with no prior experience. They are scared of doing it wrong, of being bad at yoga, and I tell them – you don’t have to be great, or even good. It doesn’t matter how low your warrior goes, or whether you can hold a balanced tree pose, just that you like how it feels.
So it is with yoga, and so it is with writing.
You don’t have to be great, or even good, to call yourself an author. You don’t need a published book or rave reviews. You don’t need a degree or a website. You just have to like how writing feels.
That’s what I told Erika. And I told her another secret, too: if you write often enough, and for long enough, the skills will develop on their own. Bad writing can become good writing with practice. Or, as we say in yoga, let the pose do the work.
If you like how writing feels, let go of expectations of the product and focus on the process. Enjoy it. Let the act of writing itself be enough.
Just as you, the author, are enough.
Bio: Jessi Waugh lives at the Carolina coast. Her background is in science and education; she is currently a yoga teacher as well as the Carteret Writers secretary. Jessi’s fiction, essays, and poetry are published in Main Street Rag, Carolina Woman, and Kakalak, among others. She is currently working on a novel. Find her blog at www.jessiwaughwriter.com.
