It’s Monday morning and last night I finished  four days of teaching memoir and personal essay in the Writers Studio at UCLA Extension. This was writing boot camp – starting at ten every morning (earlier Thursday, the first day) and going until six in the evening. Eight hour days of writing, reading your work aloud, studying the craft of memoir and essay and how to market your work, and listening to inspiration from a speaker (my former student, the incandescent Monica Holloway, author of Driving With Dead People and the upcoming Cowboy and Wills.) And then going home or to a hotel room to prepare for the next day and writing some more. Four days of nothing but focusing on writing.

I miss my students this morning. I miss their stories. Amazing stories they wrote and read aloud. Some harrowing and some funny, all deep and honest and necessary to write down. And I sit here this morning wondering who will keep writing, which stories will be published. As I told them over and over, being stubborn is one of the most important keys to writing. Not giving up. Not succumbing to that voice in your head that says: Who cares? This sucks. This is too personal to write about. This is too hard to write. Why write about this stuff? Etc. etc.

But for four days they ignored that voice and wrote their hearts out. And here’s what I want to say to them (and to you) this morning: keep going. The only way to silence that negative voice in your head is by writing your way right past it, through it, over it. One of the exercises we did in the workshop was This I Believe (to send to NPR) And this is what I believe: everyone of us has a story (or stories) about our life that we need to write. As Brenda Ueland says in her classic book on writing, If You Want to Write, the only thing stopping us is our “anxious vanity and fear of failure.”  She also writes that the purpose of existence is “to discover truth and beauty and express it…share it with others.:

Just do it.  Write.