Why Write?

In which I respond to the Introduction of This Is Not a Writing Manual (TINAWM) and explain what the heck we’re doing here.

It strikes me as I begin this process that it’s no accident that my first published book was non-fiction, and not fiction (TINAWM).  I’m doing Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way right now, and one of the cornerstones of the course—and something many artists continue throughout their entire artistic lives—is Morning Pages.  This is a minimum of 3 handwritten pages that are supposed to take out the trash of your mind. It’s longhand journaling you’re not supposed to go back and reread, or even use.  It’s clearing a path for the good stuff to make its glittering red carpet entry. 

After 2 weeks of Morning Pages, I realized something: I had to write TINAWM to take out the trash of my writing life.  I’m not saying the book IS trash.  Far from it.  It is, as I put it in my Introduction, “you and me in writing therapy together, so we can talk about what it means to be a writer and why the writing life is worth living.”  It was a book I HAD TO WRITE to my younger writer self, to give her the love and advice she couldn’t get anywhere else.  It was a re-parenting and self-excavation I had to do to clear the path for the novels that would finally find publication. 

Many of you know that I wrote five unpublished novels before The Kennedy Debutante sold at auction. All of them—every word—was worthwhile.  Not only did I learn a tremendous amount about the craft of writing from those five novels—all in different genres—but each of them got me further down the writing path (one of them got me into grad school, another got me my first agent, etc).  Except maybe the last YA contemporary novel I wrote after TINAWM.  That was kind of the last gasp of myself as a different kind of writer: a pantser desperate for a community, hoping it was YA where I’d carved out a name for myself as Founder and Editor of YARN (an award-winning but now defunct YA literary journal).  But I never really fit in there.  And I needed to learn that lesson one more time before I was ready to find my place in the world of publishing.

Historical fiction, it turns out, is where I belong – though it did not initially feel that way.

Oh yes, writing a historical novel about Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy, fourth of the nine famous children and JFK’s favorite sister, terrified me.

Who am I to write about the Kennedys, I wondered as I furtively Googled Kick after stumbling upon her life story while watching a BBC documentary about Chatsworth House.  For weeks, instead of doing the writing and editing I was supposed to be doing, I was fantasizing about writing a novel that would be like one I loved—Paula McClain’s The Paris Wife—starring Kick and her glamorous family and friends. 

But…. Could I do that?  I was just some housewife with five unpublished novels I her attic. 

When I tell this story at book events, I always explain that what got me out of that rut of self-doubt was two writing friends from very different parts of my writing life saying to me, “But Kerri, it’s YOUR novel.  You can write about the Kennedys however you want.”  And it’s absolutely true that that advice liberated me, gave me permission to sit down and write my version of Kick Kennedy’s life.

But on further consideration, 4 published novels and 8 years later, I can see that I had needed more than just permission from outside to write that novel. I had also needed to clear a path for myself inside myself.  I’d needed to articulate “why the writing life is worth living” before I’d published a novel.  In writing TINAWM, I validated myself as a writer.  I stood up and said, I AM A WRITER and explored all the ways that writing had helped me as a human being, not just as a publishing professional.  And I did all that even though at that point I only had 4 unpublished novels to show for my efforts. 

Writing TINAWM, then one last YA novel, made it possible for me to embrace the challenge of writing about Kick Kennedy.  Taking out that trash cleared the path for me to turn a kind of book that really scared me.

Writing TINAWM also affirmed:

Being a writer is more than books deals. 

A current book deal is no guarantee of future books deals. 

Being a writer is a commitment to myself. 

Writing is how I discover and articulate my self.

Being a writer has been a commitment to change, to craft, to my butt in the chair when I’d rather be doing something—anything—other than writing.

So here we are back in writing therapy together, Readers. I am going to re-read TINAWM chapter by chapter and respond to my decade-ago self, and share with you what I’ve learned in the last ten years.  I look forward to going on this adventure here with you on Substack. (And I’d be very grateful if you spread the word, made comments, and rolled up your sleeves here with me).  If you’d like to follow along by reading the original, you can order a copy anywhere books are sold.

Next up, “Drafting: Buy a Planner.”

Come on. You know you’ve had your eye on that pretty planner at your local indie….

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Pre-order here!