Yes, You Deserve to Write

Nine years ago, after the release of my how-to writing book, “Writer with a Day Job” (Harper Collins/Writers Digest Books, 2011), I got a note from a woman who said that her personal takeaway from the book was that we deserve to write.

Like many of us, this woman was balancing a job, family life and some elder care responsibilities.

Here’s an excerpt from her very kind email:  

“Sometimes it's hard to justify writing even an hour a day when my job demands so much of me, and when the people I love need me so much.

Your approach has helped me make an important shift: recognizing that it's writing that makes me a better person; that this feeds everything else.”

I must admit: For years and years (too many years), this “deserving” issue was the biggest block to my own writing.

I believed that a girl like me—a new immigrant in America, a working wife, the child of working class parents—was an imposter. 

I believed that creative writing was for the believers. The rich. The leisured. The erudite.  Or often, as I sat in a strip mall bagel shop scribbling in my journal, I envisioned a grand American literate—an exclusive club of scribes to which I would never really belong.

Why? Because there were too many other things seeking or needing my attention and who was I to deflect from those things in order to write?

Put simply, I believed that writing was for those who didn’t lie awake at night worrying about the mortgage or the credit cards.

Later, after I published some short stories and creative nonfiction essays and my first books, I still wrote with a certain timidity. 

I regret this now.

Now I know that writing is as much about believing as it is about doing.  Above all, it’s about believing that writing is something that you deserve to do. Like my reader pointed out, writing feeds us and makes us feel better and, in so doing, it allows us to bring our best selves to all the non-writing commitments in our lives.