A Writer's Creed

Written for a class assignment at UBC, in which we were asked to reflect upon what we had learned through this particular course.

*


I do not need to be anyone else.
That’s the simple truth I’m taking into the next ten years of my writing life. I don’t need to be the wisest, the best, the most poetic, the most erudite. I don’t need the biggest vocabulary, the largest store of clever witticisms, the deepest insight into philosophy and psychology and the meaning of the universe.
Because that’s not where writing comes from.
In the words of a wise man, the foundation of writing is the activity of discovering what I have to write. And what I am discovering, every day, is that I have more to write than I’d ever dreamed.
I have pain. Tears. Sorrows and hurts and fears and griefs that sometimes feel too private to share.
I have joy. Laughter. Giggles and giddiness and lightheaded, lighthearted effervescence that doesn’t always seem serious enough to write about.
I have love. Romance. Warmth and tenderness and passion that belongs to me – and to the rest of the human race.
I have everything else. The mundane. The routine. The commonplace, workaday, ordinary stuff of which daily life is made.
Put it all together and I have a world. A galaxy. A universe of thought and idea and emotion that can be expressed and communicated in words. A heaven and an earth that can be united in the experience of being human.
Which is what I will spend tomorrow doing. And the next day. And all the days after that in this new decade of my writing life.
I will write them all, the pain and the tears and the giggles and the mundanities, and I will strive to find the words that make them speak to others. The words that dance, the phrases that sing, the sentences that weave new meaning out of a collection of letters and syllables.
I will put the editor in her place and send the censor back where she belongs. I will allow myself to write from the heart first and worry about the consequences later. I will jump into the water with both feet and trust that, even if I splutter and struggle and flail wildly and come up gasping for air, I will not drown. I will break the water’s surface with a glorious, resonant, reverberating splash – and who knows where the ripples will spread?
So here goes nothing. It’s just me and my pen and a universe waiting to be discovered.
Three. Two. One.
Jump.