I’m Very Glad I Wrote

Last Friday, at the Santa Fe International Literary Festival, NPR’s Scott Simon sat across from Judy Blume and asked if she missed writing.

She is eighty-eight years old. Her last book was published more than a decade ago. She spends her days now reading children’s books behind the counter of her bookstore in Key West, Florida. She has been a writer for fifty years. She is not a writer anymore.

Scott Simon said he had the sense she didn’t miss it.

“I don’t miss writing,” she said, “but I’m very glad I wrote. Writing changed my life. But it was time to let it go. Could I have come up with more ideas and written more books? Yes. But I’m really happy I found something else I love to do.”

Judy Blume wrote Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret and Deenie and Tiger Eyes and Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing and Blubber and dozens more. She fought censorship battles for decades, books challenged in school libraries across the country. She wrote for children who felt unseen — confused, embarrassed, growing up in a world where adults pretended certain things did not exist. She wrote them into the world and made them feel less alone.

She began as a reader. She began with stories bouncing around inside her head at age nine, stories she never told anyone because she feared they would think she was strange. She sold felt art pieces until she had $300, bought herself a small electric typewriter, and started. Fifty years of books followed.

When Simon asked about her characters — whether Margaret ever knocked on the door asking to be let out — Blume shook her head. “Margaret is always going to be twelve,” she said. “She’s not knocking, saying let me out, I’m in menopause. They are what they are. They stay in the book. They live for me in the book. And then I have to let them go.”

She let them go. She is glad she wrote them. She does not miss it.

Laura Ingalls Wilder did not begin writing until she was sixty-five years old.

She had lived the story first. She grew up on the American frontier — in Wisconsin, in Kansas, in Minnesota, in South Dakota — in the years when the land was still being settled, when families still traveled by covered wagon, when the winters came hard and the nearest town was a day’s ride away. By the time she sat down to write, the frontier was gone. The people she had grown up among were nearly gone too.

She wrote to preserve what she had seen before it disappeared entirely. She wrote nine novels in the Little House series. The last,

She wrote to preserve what she had seen before it disappeared entirely. She wrote nine novels in the Little House series. The last, These Happy Golden Years, was published in 1943. She was seventy-six years old.

She lived fourteen more years. She did not publish another novel. She had written what she needed to write. She died in 1957, three days after her ninetieth birthday, with her books still in print and still being read.

She had done the work while the work was there. When it was done, she let it go. She did not miss it, either.

Blume and Wilder lived in different centuries, wrote for different readers, led entirely different lives. The line between them is the same line.

Neither woman wrote to build a career. Neither wrote because writing was her identity. Both wrote because the stories were there and the readers needed them — Blume’s twelve-year-olds who needed someone to speak plainly about growing up, Wilder’s children who needed to know the world they came from before it was forgotten entirely.

Both finished when the work was done. Both were glad they wrote. Neither missed it.

The Power of Authors teaches: purpose is not a career. It is not an identity. It is not something to maintain. It is something you carry while it is alive and put down when it is complete. The author writing from genuine purpose does not have to write forever. They have to write faithfully while the stories are there.

Blume had stories at nine years old, bouncing a rubber ball against the side of her house. She wrote them for fifty years. She let the last one go.

What are you carrying right now? Not the story you might write someday. The one alive in you today. The one your reader is already waiting for.

Write it while it is there.

Discover why purpose is the foundation of every sentence worth writing in The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen.

The Power of Authors is available from Amazon or your favorite bookseller: http://evanswensen.com. If you’d like an autographed copy, you can order it here: http://bit.ly/4pgmzjM.

 

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