For the past few months I?ve been going through my father?s writing. He passed away in 2011, and left behind manuscripts of short stories, a novel or two, the unfinished biography of the ornithologist Alexander Wilson, letters, and pieces he wrote for magazines. There are also journals he kept from various times in his life, chronicling the summer he met my mother, the first years after my family moved to Cape Cod, and my parent?s honeymoon adventures driving cross country to work as fire lookouts on a California mountaintop. It?s a trove, and much of it was unpublished in his lifetime.
My mother has also written journals and a few romance novels. My parents passed along their love of reading and writing to me and my three sisters. We all of us write, although we came to it in our own way?growing up, never was the idea of writing ever really discussed in the family. Or maybe I was too young to remember such discussions.
My sister, Robin, was the first to embrace writing, becoming a poet at an early age. Poetry was to me like a foreign language, the expression of ancient peoples. Then I heard my sister, Laurie, was writing for children, and publishing a piece in Turtle magazine before turning her attention to young adult. My sister, Cynthia, was writing a YA as well, before embracing romance novels. Where did all this writing come from? Where was I when these decisions were made?
I didn?t do much writing as a kid and I was a tortuously slow reader. Still, in school I was good at answering essay questions. I could always fudge my way through a test if there were essay questions. In college I had to shape up and write papers. I was a terrible writer; I had no grammar skills and my spelling was bad. I had no patience for writing, although I loved having written.
Early in my freshman year I turned in a paper. Its themes were overshadowed by my lack of basic grammar skills. The instructor sent me to a writing lab where a mildly impatient writing teacher went through the paper with me and marked it up. I thought, okay I?ll do better on the next paper. No?what I learned was that you always have a second chance. A first draft begets a second draft which begets a third. I rewrote the paper using his suggestions and turned it in again. I got a B. Now I understood?the first words you put on paper don?t have to be the last.
After I graduated college and struck out on my own, I was driven to writing like an alcoholic to the bottle. At first, novels, later adding short stories to the mix. I don?t know where this instinct came from. There was no precursor, no master plan. In my 20s I wrote a lot of first drafts. I typed them, I should say. I banged out three different first drafts of the same basic novel (my university novel, I was fond of thinking) and I would go over that draft with a pen, marking it up, making arrows to tell me where to move things. But it never got beyond that point. Instead of typing up the next draft, I would just start another novel.
It wasn?t that I was lazy?well, maybe a type of lazy?it was more that I didn?t have confidence in my writing. I was ashamed at how bad at grammar and spelling I still was. To show my writing to another writer, let alone my father, let alone consider publishing anything was out of the question. It was as out of the question as flying to the moon or dating Cindy Crawford.
I began to recognize the shorthand of writer?s speak within my own family. My sisters were sharing? pages with each other. I got in on that, completing the loop, creating a casual family writing group. When we felt we were ready, we would show our parents our writing to get that final approval. Through this form of critiquing I learned more about revision, about cutting words, about structure, and about strong beginnings and endings. The eager insouciance of my early prose gave way to more careful, selective writing.
I eventually joined a writing group, published a first story, started taking workshops in Boston and meeting other writers, published a couple more stories, and collected hundreds of rejections slips. But my early writing education within my own family, even though I didn?t realize it for what it was at the time, helped launch me into a wider writing world.
My sisters still write, as do I. And we still exchange chapters. I?m starting to see the connection between our parents? work and our own. A particular sentiment, a strain of humor, a love of naturalism and land, an empathy. These writing traits are the greatest gifts from our parents?our upbringing instilled in us a courage to do the things we love and a sense of adventure with which we write and live our lives. My early, mysterious fits of writing may have seemed like I was possessed by forces beyond my experience, but I?ve come to realize that my family initially planted this precious writing seed and has been fostering it ever since.
Source: http://beyondthemargins.com/2013/05/a-family-of-writers/
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