I was feeling very Little Miss Super Pity last month. Cranky, blue, more than little lost. For a couple of reasons. The Extraordinarily Difficult Situation persists, as EDSs tend to do. At work, I was grandly misunderstood. And half a dozen people, all in the same week, asked me to read their manuscripts. All this extra work! Little Miss Super cried. Why me!? Why now?

Then I woke up the other morning and realized, in the knick of time, this: people ask me for an opinion. I have become the person, at least in this one way, an important way, I dreamed I might be. People around me—people I value very much—ask me what I think of their work. This is an honor, the wise part of me realized. And so I could explain it to the little whiny Miss Me. Yes. It’s some extra work. I know you want to ski and then come home and relax in front of the bug program (Life in the Undergrowth—it’s truly fantastic and helpful in coming to clarity re the work situation) and not read more pages tonight. But this is a privilege and you’ve earned it. To someone, your opinion matters a little. Isn’t that an amazing and blessed circumstance?

And I read the work of my friends, with grace and pleasure. And got over myself.

*

what I know about how

Meanwhile, here’s what I have noticed, in thinking about my students who are thriving as writers and my students who are struggling to make their work come alive on the page.  And in thinking about my own growth as a writer, what I know now that I didn’t know before, and how I came to know more about writing.

1. We don’t work on a piece of writing. We practice making every day. Pieces of writing evolve and improve from this practice. But it’s to a practice we go each day, not a sheet of paper, not a product, not a piece. Practice teaches us. Working on a piece only limits not only the piece, but the writer.
2. We don’t think about voice, audience, tone, or the point. We hope to get a little heat generated; the writing is rubbing our hands together and the process is seeing what happens next.
3. We don’t enter the writing studio with an idea or even a question. We begin the same way—some little ritual we’ve invented, based on what worked one day when we got lucky—every day.
4. We don’t miss too many days. When we do miss, we felt the cost, we sense what’s lost.
5. We work on two things. One thing is teaching is us (we’re making a huge mess). The other thing is where we see what we’ve learned (it’s always slighter than our dreams). Usually, the thing we love and want to show as Our Great Work! is the former. We learn more from our losses, our mistakes, our failures.
6. Stay in love with it (your house, your man, your project, the day) by steering always towards the mystery.

Don’t get sucked in to a project. Take classes. Teach someone else what you know.

When I hear “digital world” I always first think of my fingers and my toes. Their beauty.Their ridiculousness.Their tastes and wondering. I think of when I was kid—that digital world. How I came to know so much through my digits.

And I think of writing by hand, and what a difference it makes in my own work, in the work of my students, to slow down. To feel paper, pencil—to draw. I want there to be some parts of life that are absolutely quiet, where a certain aspect of soul can come forward.  There’s a digital world right before us, one that centers us in our own creating. I don’t want to lose that. I don’t want my students—who spend most of the rest of their time in the electrified digital world—to lose touch with something elemental, sacred, mysterious, and increasingly rare: the pencil paper world.

Here’s what employers want: creative people who show up on and time. Good social skills combined with a good work ethic. And people who understand how to convert a complex set of messages into a story. English majors do this! They can do this really, really well. English majors understand the power of story, and its deep structure. They know how to manipulate the molecules of story. Sometimes, the best way to play, to create, is on a screen. I think of video games and texting—trading story bits back and forth. I want to keep one hand in that world.

I blog. I know Dreamweaver. I can work on an Excel spreadsheet, and I can tag back, Skype, I would be lost without my library’s online databases. I love the digital world. But I also want to remember paper to us all. And I want to make sure we value the time spent out of that world.

Can’t you please stop sending things in the mail?my agent pleads with me. Everything electronically, please! My private clients, several of whom live far away, understandably want to beam their work to me, instead of the whole rigamarole of post office, seven days of waiting, all that paper—it’s slow and clunky. I understand that. I don’t want to become a crank at all.

But I also want to make sure we save room for, and don’t diminish, the power of sitting down alone, in a room, with a pencil and a heart, a brain and a sheet of paper, and making an elegant thing, with the body, the original digits, from scratch. I want to make sure there’s a room in the house of the English Major—a really elegant, beautifully furnished, simple room, with good light, and plenty of space for pacing—where a writer can sit, alone, at a table, and simply be.

It is from that state of focus and concentration that great ideas spring.

And down the hall, I see the thrilling wired world, and students there, too, making amazing connections.

We were all once babies. Living in the original, essential digital world, fingers in the mouth, toes in the mouth. In touch with a kind of knowing that’s pre-verbal, totally digital, shaping each moment into something like a story.

I am divided into two. I’m the wired hungry learner who posts and clicks and seeks, the woman who doesn’t want to shut down, become cranky, just sayNo! No! The Old Ways are Most Pure! And I’m the teacher-writer who knows in her heart we must keep the quiet room warm, stocked, and open: to keep teaching ourselves how to sit alone with our selves, and know.

Can you make a story with a pencil? I imagine my students being asked at their first job interview. A kid still can do that. What can you do when the power goes out, how do you contribute?

Everything you need is in you.