I need about one hundred fifty drafts of a poem to get it right, and fifty more to make it sound spontaneous.”
James Dickey, Poet
You have often heard it said to “grow where you are planted.” Fitting, because plants will grow just about anywhere, no matter the conditions. Whether or not they survive after coming through the soil is quite another feat.
I noticed lately a stretch of mushrooms in the yard. There were small ones popping up near my rose bushes, and larger ones in the backyard reaching toward the pine trees. I also observed they all grew in rows. They did not simply appear in a bunch, but grew along the edging in the rose bed and then in their own outlined row up the hill in the back. Being a neat freak with a preference for order, I appreciated this design.
Despite our weather being odd, warm when it should be cold, and now bitterly cold (it is December after all!), they grew despite the strange and dry weather.
As I studied the beige fungi, I thought how courageous they were to just appear. And then to go in a direction of their choosing. Well, I’m not entirely sure that is how it works. But in my creative, imaginative, writer’s mind, that is what I had decided.
And sometimes, as writers, we not only appear, but we expand beyond the reaches of either normalcy or what is expected. It takes courage to put our work out there, but we do it because we love what we do.
I was in a writing group where we were tasked to write pieces based upon prompts our host was sharing. One of the prompts asked us to think about challenges we had to overcome in our writing journey. I have had many, as I am sure you have, but my poetry journey stood out in this instance. I wrote more on my challenge in a recent blog post, but in short, I had listened to the negativity so much early in my writing life that I had given it up for a long time. It was only reawakened last year during April’s National Poetry Month.
Negativity, criticism, and disbelief that we can ever become anyone with our writing can bring us down for sure. Or we might experience other challenges—health, disasters, economic problems—that can trip us up in our writing travels for a while because now our focus is needed elsewhere.
In all my many years of writing, in various forms, I have not always known the direction I should aim. But I keep moving. I keep writing, knowing my labor in penning amazing stories and words is not wasted.
We can choose our direction in our writing journey. Or we may simply choose the destination and remain open to the various routes that get us there.
The key is to write where you are in life despite your current environment. You might only write a little before you write more. But pretty soon, you will have a trail of work behind you as you lead the way in your journey.
Follow Emma Kathryn Harris on Facebook and Instagram.
