I’m about to have an idea. Don’t ask me how I know it, I just do, and I’m super excited about it. I’m also about to have a nephew, and my vocabulary isn’t deep enough to express how thrilled I am about his new human who is about to be my favorite human who has ever existed. I’m actually excited about a number of pending things, which shouldn’t be an unusual thing to confess, except that it is. Because it’s not just that I’m excited about things that I’m waiting for, but also that I’m actually enjoying waiting for them. And that is new.
Writing words that matter: “Everyone needs a god who looks like them”
I recently became the last person on the planet to read Sue Monk Kidd’s Secret Life of Bees, and fell in love with it in a way I haven’t fallen in love with a book in a long time. It was like discovering The Great Gatsby again for the first time, or To Kill a Mocking Bird, or A Prayer for Owen Meany. It became one of my favorite books, even before I’d read the last page.
As a writer, these experiences of falling in love with a book are particularly overwhelming. Not only is there excitement, infatuation and enjoyment, but also aspiration. I want to write like this. I want to make readers feel this way.
Everything But the Writing
During a recent presentation to college students about entrepreneurship in the arts, I asked the class what they thought a freelance writer did with her time all day. Their guesses included “thinking about character development” and “writing,” and bless their hearts, that would be amazing. But as any freelance writer can attest, the business of pitching stories, research, contacting sources, waiting for sources to call back and interviewing sources takes up the bulk of one’s life. So much, in fact, that I often (or, rather, daily) find myself with this problem: I feel so accomplished by the time I finally hang up the phone after an interview call, that I’m all, “Done! I’m finished! Let’s go fishing or whatever!”
Natalie Burg 