JOY
by Deb Vanasse
Why do you write? I hope that your answer, in some measure or another, boils down to sheer joy.Joy comes in many disguises, some of which we don’t recognize at first. It’s an elusive thing, with a tendency to slip away when we need it most. Your joy and mine may spring from different sources. That’s okay. What matters is that we recognize the pulse points of joy in our writing so we can return to them again and again as we perfect our craft.For me, joy comes from the beauty of language, the amazing way a bunch of letters on a page can make me cry and laugh and gasp and long for something I didn’t even know I wanted. Joy comes the power of a simple story to convey deep and complex truths, to make me think about something in a completely different way, to make me feel as if I’m walking and living and breathing alongside the most amazing people, amazing in their capacity to live and love and fail and cry and press on despite all odds.I love the joy of writing words that touch something inside me that I didn’t know was there. I love the joy of speaking on the page, of perfecting my meaning, and perfecting it again, and finally realizing there is no perfection. I take joy in communicating to someone, somewhere, who will nod and say, yes, I’m listening, I’ve felt that way, too.Maybe the joy you get from writing doesn’t come from any of things. Maybe your joy comes from the sense of accomplishment, the challenge of doing your best, the achievement of seeing your name in print, sometimes against all odds. Whatever the source of your joy, grab onto it and don’t let go.When I lose touch with joy, my craft suffers, so I try to make joy-recovery activities a part of my writing routines. Typing beautiful passages from some of my favorite books reminds me of the pure joy of language. Anthony Doerr’s About Grace is brimming with scenes that take my breath away, so lately I’ve been typing some of those, trying to feel the cadence and beauty through my fingers. Re-reading favorites, including picture books from childhood, also resurrects my joy in the creative process. I recently got a long distance call from my son, newly married. He was sitting at Applebee’s with his new bride, wanting to know if I could remember the name of a book he’d loved as a child, something with badgers in it. He wanted to tell his wife about it. He told me with pride that she’d just read Where the Red Fern Grows at his urging, a book she’d never read as a child, and he said she cried all night after finishing it. With his wife, he is re-discovering the power of shared stories, and the joy of knowing someone else feels their power, too.Discovery is the most elusive of my creative joys, because I have so little control over when and how it happens. I’ve been working for months on a novel involving a black wolf. The wolf came to me in a dream, completely unbidden, so powerfully that I woke and lay in bed, trying to figure out where it had come from and what it meant. A few weeks later I realized the wolf was part of a story I’d been planning to write for years, though I’d never figured any kind of animal, much less a black wolf, into that particular plot. I worked through about 25,000 words and stopped. I knew how the story would come together, but I felt the power of it slipping away. Then, not long after I picked it up again, I recognized the wolf as a metaphor for something much bigger, something deep and powerful that I was wrestling with in my own life. Along with the joy of discovery, my story has been infused with meaning. That’s joy, all right. 