“You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.” -Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
The rain painted my windshield as I slowly made my way down the freeway on the long trek home, and suddenly it hit me. Hard. Just one song. One tiny song and a flood of words hit me harder than the rain drowning me that night. Words and images and conversations and lovely combinations of sentences surrounded me so much that it was almost hard to see. And as soon as I got home, I put paper to pen, and it all poured out of me; words and thoughts that I had held in for so long were finally free.
There are things in life that you desperately want to write about, but you sometimes you have to wait. Sometimes, it takes awhile to be able to formulate the perfect words to attempt to explain an experience, an event, or a person; it takes time. And before you know it, you have the makings of your first novel. Something that you are really excited about. Something that only reminds you of the thing, the person that you end up always writing about. That you never seem to stop missing. Some things are far too precious to simply throw a few sentences together to describe. You are striving for words that resonate and transcend. Sometimes, you have to be really really patient. But sometimes, some things, the best things, are well worth the wait.
