Sue Monk Kidd

When I was a young writer of thirty and just setting out, I traveled to North Carolina to hear Maya Angelou give a lecture on writing. I sat on the sixth row of the large auditorium while the tall woman with the powerful presence spoke about the cost of carrying untold stories inside, about wielding a voice in the world, about writing that brings the reader alive. Her words stirred up every longing I had. I sat there like a snow globe turned upside down.

All my yearnings and hopes, however, were so much larger than my abilities. The first piece of writing I had ever submitted for publication was to Sandlapper, a small regional magazine in South Carolina, now no longer in circulation. It was a short fictional story about a girl living in a small Southern town. I worked very hard on it, but still had to scrape up my courage to send it off, which involved standing in the post office, clutching the envelope with the manuscript inside, debating whether I could go through with the radical act of dropping it into the mail slot. My story was returned a month later without an accompanying rejection letter, just three words written in all caps on the first page of the manuscript, followed by a particularly painful exclamation point:

THIS IS USELESS!

So began my career.

To be fair, the story I sent off that day probably was useless. The manner in which this message was delivered to me, however, decimated me with doubt. I burned the story in the fireplace, then scooped the ashes into the dustpan and dumped them into the garbage bin. This little ceremony was, I suppose, a way to cope with the humiliating failure I felt. At the time it was hard to know whether it was an act of giving up or moving on.

Listening to Maya Angelou that day, I wanted so badly to believe in myself, to believe I could write what was inside me, become a real voice, and create works that brought life and meaning to readers. I didn’t know how to make that happen.

Then Dr. Angelou made the clearest, simplest, most profound declaration about writing I’ve ever heard. She said, “There are only three things you need in order to write. First, you need something to say. Second, you need the ability to say it. Finally, you need the courage to say it at all.”

I can’t exactly explain why I found this statement so immense. Perhaps because she took what seemed bewildering, overwhelming, and vaguely terrifying and distilled it into something I could, with work and resolve, actually do. In fact, she followed up her statement by informing us that we all had something to say if we searched deeply within, and that the ability to say it could be learned and honed with practice. Finding the courage to say it at all will be the hardest one, she told us.

Her words gave me reassurance that becoming a writer was not beyond me.

I should be clear, though. Writing is difficult—full of hard work, doubt, fear, rejection, agonizing persistence, and death-defying trapeze leaps. But writing is also doable—let’s put that out there, too. And let’s even acknowledge that it has its cures, revelations, soul-making, and blisses.

At this point in my life, I’ve traversed over four decades of writing. During those years I explored those “three things” as deeply as I could. This exploration, more than anything, is what shaped my writing.

Having something to say as a writer is a mysterious and highly individual affair. Why do we write about this and not that? Where does our subject matter or vision for our work come from? Is it imposed on us by a set of expectations about what we or others think we should write? Do we arrive at it by emulating other authors or to please the family and culture that shaped us? For a writer, it’s often a shock, a kind of going-to-your-knees moment, when you realize you must rely on your own voice and not that of others.

To have something genuine and all your own to say, the writer must look within. Even when an outer occurrence strikes you with creative inspiration—a person’s idle comment, an interaction between two people in a hospital waiting room, the life of a historical figure, the sound of a thunderstorm, or a piece of art—its creative current, that little river of sparks you feel when you encounter it, is there because it’s pinging off of soulful or psychic content inside you.

My second novel, The Mermaid Chair, was inspired by a simple comment: “While I was in Cornwall, I saw a mermaid chair in a church.” Those words prompted an image to well up in my mind of an ancient chair carved with mermaids, sitting in a monastery chapel beside the sea. My imagination started to vibrate, to come to life, to tango across the dance floor. A mermaid in a church was literally a fish-out-of-water tale. I didn’t know what my story would be about, but I could sense it just beyond my intellect, in that place between imagination and feeling. The chance comment had landed upon a collection of dualities that were particularly resonant in me. The sensual and the spiritual. The above and the below. The pull of the divine and the pull of the body. Monks and mermaids. How do we reconcile these two natures in ourselves? They’d been a bundle of live wires waiting to be stepped on.

We all possess an inner reservoir of unique and evocative images, dreams, intuitions, feelings, attachments, memories, experiences, longings, fascinations, metaphors, symbols, collective archetypes, and capacities for wonder and imagination. C. G. Jung poetically referred to this interior realm as the inscrutable old country, the hinterland of the mind. It’s where the soul lives and plays and has its being.

The writer’s transaction with soul is what brings depth, authenticity, originality, imagination, and emotional reverberation to what we have to say. Soul, however, is one of those things that eludes definition. The Greek word for soul is psyche. People often speak of it as an immortal essence, but fundamentally, soul is simply the rich, interior life of the psyche. I once had a sign on my desk with a quote by Keats: “I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of the Imagination.” When I think of soul, that’s what comes to me. Heart and imagination.

If you encounter writing infused with soul, you know it. It feeds you somewhere inside. Such writing can open your eyes and your heart, reenchant your world or rearrange how you see it. It can return you to yourself. A work with soul lingers. It leaves a mark. It can even change you.

But revelations from the mysterious hinterland are unpredictable. Their appearance can’t be coerced or controlled. It’s hard, for instance, to manufacture an image from the unconscious or fabricate a creative aha. There’s a parallel here to Annie Dillard’s observation, “I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam.” We may not be able to force the psyche to offer up its creative pearls, but no doubt the soul wishes to reveal itself. In the words of Parker Palmer, the soul does not want to be saved. It wants to be witnessed, to be seen and heard.

The question becomes how can we, as writers, put ourselves in the path of soul?

Unlike finding something to say, acquiring the ability to say it can be taught, learned, and adapted to create your own individual approach. No matter what you hope to write, there’s some craft to learn. That seems so obvious, yet I once had a conversation with an orthopedic surgeon who told me he planned to take four weeks off during the summer to write a novel. “An entire novel?” I asked, unable to contain my astonishment, me being someone who’d once taken over three years to create one. He’s probably been reading fiction techniques for some time, I reasoned. He’s probably squeezed in workshops and practiced. But no. He tells me he has never attempted to write fiction before, doesn’t really know much about the craft, and doesn’t have a lot of time to read books. Never mind, though, he’s going to write a novel in four weeks. I tried to imagine myself taking four weeks off to learn how to perform arthroscopic surgery, but I couldn’t picture it.

When I first began writing, I was oblivious about the craft. Motivated by my spectacular level of cluelessness, I lit upon the idea of becoming an apprentice. The notion seemed antiquated, but it gave me permission to take my time and learn. It was a way to manage expectations, a kind of identity.

I signed up for writing classes, joined a writing group, attended workshops. I read and read, trying to do so at the level I wanted to write, an enterprise both wondrous and daunting. I pulled apart the novels and memoirs I especially loved in search of the authors’ methods, trying to see how they created scenes, composed dialogue, or described characters. I was after the “engineering,” as Cynthia Ozick referred to it—the interior architecture. Mostly I practiced, sending my manuscripts off to journals and magazines, including that notoriously “useless” one.

Gradually I got the hang of the basic craft techniques and began to develop my own repertoire of methods and approaches. I’m talking about years here. Years. Most writers have a private toolbox that holds their tricks of the trade, the unique ways they go about saying what they have to say. When I was in full apprenticeship mode, I devoured the volumes of Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, along with essays and articles about craft like they were suspense thrillers, fascinated by the secrets the writers divulged. This one by John Irving, for instance: “A good beginning will suggest knowledge of the whole story: it will give a strong hint regarding where the whole story is headed.” This led me to envision the opening paragraph of my novels as a seed from which the rest of the story would sprout and grow. It’s a tactic I keep now in my own toolbox.

Writing an opening paragraph in that particular way is not a rule; it’s a method, one that may or may not work for you. As Colson Whitehead put it, “There are no rules. If everyone jumped off a bridge, would you do it, too? No. There are no rules except the ones you learned during your Show and Tell days.” I believe that, too. No rules. But there are methods and techniques. Some of them might be the old classics, like the five components of a scene. Others might be basic approaches you’ve retooled to suit yourself or strategies you’ve adopted from other writers. Some will be your own marvelous concoctions.

Maya Angelou was right about courage. It’s the hardest one.

Courage is a heart thing. The word courage comes from the Latin word cor, which means “heart.” For writers, courage is the heart force that makes it possible for us to “say it at all.”

I grew up in a world where quiet ladies who held their tongues were loved and lauded. There was a cross-stitched picture that hung on my bedroom wall when I was a girl that said, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” You have no idea of the sheer volume of words I swallowed. Controversial beliefs, upsetting questions, uncomfortable feelings, wild ideas . . . you know, my truth. Is it any wonder I have a soft, raging spot in me for those who’ve been silenced, for anyone who has felt the need to swallow their words or dilute their truth in order to avoid disapproval, attack, or ostracism?

The willingness to express your creative voice, to make your writing visible in the world, and even the lengths you’re willing to go out on a literary limb in order to follow your creative urgings involve a revelation of self that can be both terrible and beautiful. Terrible because there’s a vulnerability to it. Beautiful because there’s a vulnerability to it. Courage doesn’t happen without this terrible-beautiful vincibility.

I found the force of my heart buried within my anger and sadness at silenced voices. I found it in the bravery of women writers long before me who were denied and ridiculed. Like so many writers, I mostly found it because there comes a time when feeling safe matters less than being a voice.

This book is part memoir, part guidebook, and part reflection on the writing life. I first realized I wanted to pass on what I’d learned about writing, creativity, and soul years ago when a young woman came to me and expressed her desire to become a writer. “Would you mentor me?” she asked.

She was full of longing. She wanted to go out there and plant her heart in the world. She wanted to be a voice. To tell stories, create language, and make meaning, but she wasn’t sure how to make it happen. Her yearning and hope felt so much larger to her than her ability. She reminded me of myself when I was beginning.

The young woman is my daughter, Ann. I tried to impart to her everything I could about the mystery, method, and meaning of writing. She went on to become a writer with her own storehouse of experience and skill. She became my first reader, offering valuable insights and suggestions for my novels. I learned from her just as she had learned from me. That’s really what convinced me to write this book—the realization that at any age, any level of experience we can learn from one another.

Writing is a solitary enterprise, but it doesn’t happen in a vacuum. The creative person, the creative process, the creative work are all vastly affected by the support and sustenance that surround us. We all need someone to hold up a light. To say, I see you. I see what you’re doing.

I cannot offer you the keys to the writing kingdom. I would if I could, but I doubt they exist; at least I don’t have them. What I can offer is my own process and experience in the hope they will provide inspiration, guidance, and support.

Whether you’re new to writing or you’ve been at it for a long while, the possibility exists for new depth, new artistry, and new bravery. You only need three things. But what multitudes they contain.