They're Not Drinking

While my own November efforts are coming along swimmingly, it never ceases to affect me when others around me aren't going at it with the same enthusiasm. It makes me feel as though I've somehow failed.

Then I think of my harp. I took harp for a number of years (a very small number involving a decimal point) from a woman who makes her entire living playing and teaching harp. This woman spends hours every day sitting with a harp in her lap perfecting her technique, composing new pieces, thinking about new arrangements of old pieces. I'm sure that she was frustrated with my seeming lack of application - I'm not great at sight reading music, my fingers never seemed nimble enough to make the shifts from one chord to another in mid-song, and I wasn't properly apologetic when I'd gone from one lesson to another without having practiced at all.

It wasn't that I don't like the harp. On the contrary - I love it and think it's the best thing in the world. I just don't see myself ever becoming a performer on the instrument. I think it's fine if I spend five whole years trying to perfect "Garten Mother's Lullabye" and never play it for anyone who doesn't live in my house.

There are plenty of people who have no interest in writing a novel for publication. They couldn't care less about making their prose sing or seeing their books in the windows of bookstores. Those people have other things in their lives that they're striving for. They're excited about writing, but it's not their sole passion.

Each November, when I work on my new novel, I'm carried away by its possibility, and that passion informs not just the words themselves, but the speed at which I write them, but that's not the most important thing I do every November. The most important thing is learning more about myself and my own place in the world. Learning not to judge every person I see by my own standards and therefore find them wanting when they're not me. I'd like to think that the act of writing provides me one sort of view into my own heart, but that all of the work I do in accepting and being happy for the other writers with whom I surround myself gives me an even more valuable view into the parts of myself that need even more work than my first draft will.