What to write about – that is the question that has popped into my mind pretty frequently over the past few days. As I contemplate that question, I reflect on what has propelled me in the past to take pen to paper, or in this case, fingers to keyboard.
There’s no particular pattern as to when and why I write. At least no sustained pattern detectable over time.
When I first started to write I was practicing law full-time and had one child still in high school. Due to my father’s death, I had become responsible for my mother’s care, first in assisted living and then in skilled nursing, but that death had also given me the emotional freedom to write and publish my first book, a memoir entitled “Biologically Bankrupt.” I wasn’t sure who would need to read that book, but I knew without a doubt that Spirit had called me to share my story. So, I did.
Some time passed. Several years in fact. I had retired early from my law practice due to an ailing husband and moved with him to the mountains of western North Carolina. I had not really given much thought, if any, to writing anything else. However, at the suggestion of a friend that I turn “Biologically Bankrupt” into a screen play, I decided to take a week-long writing class at the John C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, North Carolina to work on my dialogue skills. (Check out the Folk School. It’s an amazing place). To my great surprise, on the second day of class during a writing exercise I was “visited” by Allison Parker, kick-ass female lawyer who can’t help but find herself in all sorts of dangerous situations - and the rest is history: seven books in the Allison Parker Mystery series, two books of essays, and a blog where I post essays like the one you are reading now.
Writing the essays has been a different sort of writing journey for me than the creative process involved with the mystery series. With the Allison Parker mysteries I have “met” all sorts of interesting people, have traveled exciting paths, dealt with assassins, murderers, blackmailers, terrorists and all sort of shady characters from the comfort of my chair and laptop. The story lines in the series have been sort of “downloaded” from the ether where my Muse resides, waxing and waning as my fingers fly over my keyboard. Sometimes I can barely keep up with what the characters are revealing – I see “it” as a movie in my head and I “hear” them as they speak to one another. I know that sounds crazy, but it’s the only way I know to describe how it works for me.
The essays are different. And the need to write them comes from a much deeper place. The ones I have written in the past three and four years have been profoundly distinct in tone from the ones written when I first delved into this genre 10 years or more ago. I find that I reveal more of myself in the essays, that I am willing to stand naked, so to speak, willing to expose myself, to let the reader inside the self that I most often keep safely private. Writing these kinds of essays is both therapeutic and necessary. The ability to express my emotions through writing when my late husband was declining into dementia and then after he died has been healing for me, and hopefully for others walking similar paths.
Now, I find myself entering a new phase of life. A new marriage. A new place to live in a house we purchased because it had a separate “writing shack” down by the river. My husband Dennis says the shack is where I will write the next great American novel. Maybe so, but more likely just a few more essays and the next book in the Allison Parker series.
I was a lawyer for three decades. I have now been a writer for more than half of the time spent in my previous profession. What has been the biggest and oddest revelation for me is that I now see myself not as a lawyer but as a writer.
How I got here has been an interesting journey. And it’s not over.