Before you call CPS, lemme back up. Nellie Cashman is my sourdough starter, and her baby is made of flour and water. I expect to report back with the results tomorrow, for better or for worse.
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| Bun in the oven |
Today's prompt comes not a moment too soon from therapist and writer Lori Gottlieb, author of a book I immensely enjoyed, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone. (Maybe I should talk to someone, no?)
Prompt: Think of a story that’s keeping you stuck—it might be a story about a friend or family member, a co-worker, or even yourself (some version of “I’m not loveable” or “I can’t trust people” or ‘Nothing ever works out for me,” etc.). Now imagine the story from the point of view of every other “character” in the story. How would they tell it? How would their version of the same event differ from yours? What can you see now that you weren’t willing or able to before? How does including their points of view add complexity and nuance to the storytelling? How does taking responsibility for your role in the story make the story far more interesting and compelling to the reader?
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Six-year-old Katie knew exactly what she wanted. Her dream was to grow up and be an author. Thirty-four-year-old Katie has let life get in the way. Burned out on college essays after earning an English degree, and unable (or unwilling) to take a risk on an uncertain form of income, she turned to the next best thing. Libraries. If she wasn't creating books, at least she could be surrounded by beautiful ones all day.
As it would turn out, Katie would spend much of her career surrounded by books that were once beautiful, but rapidly became sticky and threadbare by the many children who loved them. One of these children confessed to Katie that she wanted to be a Barbie or a princess when she grows up. Katie wondered if her childhood dream had sounded as impossible to the adults in her orbit.
Did it? Certainly not to her mother, who is prepared to buy as many extra refrigerators as it will take to display every page of Katie's first book. Certainly not to her husband, who has asked Katie several times during quarantine why she isn't writing.
"But this, the very thing I'm doing at this moment, is writing!" she'd retort.
"That's not what I mean. Write a book. When will you ever have this much time again?"
And he's not wrong. Katie can't argue with that part. So what is it? Is she afraid to sink a ton of time and energy into something that might not be good? Well, she did just halve a recipe for sourdough bread so she wouldn't waste flour...in case it wasn't good.
But! She's still making the bread. Maybe someone just needs to remind her it's okay to start small. She's not going to bang out Middlemarch on the first draft. The Old Man and the Sea is a perfectly respectable scale (at which to potentially fail).
C'mon
ReplyDeleteWhat are you waiting for? Author and throw in a few illustrations for good measure!