Years ago, I was visiting a 5th grade classroom in Tarrytown, New York. Since many of the students I speak to say they “hate writing,” my hope is to change their attitude, if only a tiny bit. I want them to realize the power of language, communication, and self-expression.
In those days, I would begin my “author talk” by asking the students if they could name an example of writing they felt had changed the world.
Hands fly up and the answers are often the same: The Declaration of Independence, The Ten Commandments, Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Origin of Species, The Magna Carta, Communist Manifesto, Diary of Anne Frank, A Silent Spring.
Okay, I add a few of my own.
“I can promise you,” I told the class that day, “that nothing I’ve written or ever will write will change history. But writing changed my life.”
I wanted them to understand that writing can do the same for them, and I knew the best way to do this was by telling a story.
“By the time I was eleven,” I began,“I had moved seven times and gone to five different schools.”
I told them about the years when the adults in my life who should have been looking out for me were not. I talked about how I had been shifted around from parent to parent to step-parents and back again, with a lot of unpleasant experiences along the way— much like the life of the protagonist in Almost Home, my second novel and the one that the class had read.
All this preamble led up to the story of my 6th grade language arts teacher who, at that very difficult time in my life, read aloud a story I had written. He was—in effect — saying that my voice mattered. He was giving me a gift.
It was in that moment I learned that there was a place I could put my thoughts, and if I did it well someone else would hear them. A place I could put my feelings, and if they were honest and real someone else would feel them.
That was when I decided I wanted to be a writer, a decision that quite literally changed the course of my history. That’s what I told the class in Tarrytown that day.
After I was done with my presentation, and the teacher signaled that enough questions had been asked and answered, she sent the class on to their next period. She was moving the tables and chairs back where they belonged while I was packing up to leave when I noticed one little boy still in the room, standing near — but not too near— where I was sitting. I smiled at him.
“Did you have a question you didn’t get to ask?” I said. “Come on over.”
He came closer. “My father told me not to tell my teacher.” He spoke in the tiniest voice. “But you’re not my teacher, right?”
There was a sadness and fear in his eyes as familiar to me as my own 6th grade reflection. “Right,” I answered. “I’m not your teacher.”
“So I can tell you, right?”
“Right.”
“My father is like the step-father in your story,” he whispered. “He’s like that.”
“He hurts you?” I asked.
The boy nodded.
“I get it,” I said. “I’m really glad you told me and since I’m not your teacher you didn’t do anything wrong. But you know I have to tell someone, right?”
Of course, he knew that.
He and I walked over to his teacher and I asked him again if I could share with her what he had told me. He nodded, and I did. She got down on her knee and assured him everything was going to be alright.
I knew I wouldn’t be allowed to follow up and find out what ultimately happened. It was confidential and, frankly, none of my business.
But whenever I think back to that unanswerable question— why do we write? — I always come back to that moment. Did what I wrote help this little boy?
Maybe.
I work on my novels for years without knowing if someone will take the time and effort to sit down and read them. And, even if they do take the time, I have no way of knowing if they’ll find meaning in my words. I have no control over how someone will feel when they read one of my books.
Will they hate it? That has happened.
Will it make them angry? That has happened, too.
Will someone read something I wrote and feel inspired? Courageous? Connected? A little less lonely?
Maybe.
That is this paradox of being a writer. We write because we are working something out about ourselves, directly or indirectly, and we write with the audacious belief that just maybe, something we write will find its way into someone else’s hands and make a difference in their life.
And we need to be comfortable knowing we may never know.
