Thank you, Edmund White

I believe when we struggle with something, and when the time is right, we're given the information we need to overcome the struggle.  Or at least to make peace with it.

As I write my novel, I often feel inferior to those writers who are able to write something totally made up.  I don't know if it's that I don't have much of an imagination (actually, a lot of things in my novel are made up), but much of the novel I'm working on is based on my personal life, or a period of my personal life, between the late-1980s and mid-2000.  I know that I couldn't write a novel as detailed and textured as the one I am now, if I hadn't based it on what happened to me.  In fact, if I hadn't based what I'm writing on what happened to me, I wouldn't be writing a novel at all.  I'd be writing essays, which I'm far more comfortable with. 

Then I was browsing through City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70, by Edmund White, at a local bookstore (yes, we still have a few of those), and I happened to open it to the page with this:

I didn't have writer's block, though all my failures with plays and fiction had left me feeling wounded.  I would feel sick with fear every time I'd begin to write something made-up [p. 141].

I recognized myself in that second sentence, and I can't tell you what a relief it was to know there was another writer–none other than Edmund White, writer of dozens of books, including non-fiction, biographies, and novels–who dreaded writing anything that wasn't anchored in what really happened to him or someone he knew.

I don't feel inferior anymore.  Just because I don't have a dazzling imagination doesn't mean I don't measure up to a writer who relies entirely on his imagination to weave his stories.  Or that I'm not a writer.  It's what we do with those personal experiences, how we dramatize them, turn them into fiction, that really marks our ability as writers.