The Tiny Grenade

First, a tiny reminder.

At the beginning of every year, I find a word. It’s a theme of sorts. Something to pray on and learn from throughout the year. And come December, I reflect on all that it gave me.

This year, the word is: wonder.

Now, a tiny time travel.

Back in 2016, I was newly living with my sister in a townhouse owned by a family friend. It was our first time living outside of our parents’ house and we were adjusting to the new freedoms and responsibilities. And I was just starting to blog regularly.

It was more or less the height of that era’s blogging. Where everyone was trying to go viral and kind of posting the exact same thing and I was just biding my time until I believed I would “hit it big” because, I thought, that was the whole point. So I told myself I just had to be patient, just had to write that one thing that would gain me the masses and let me quit my job and write for a living and ride off into the sunset with book deals and the like, forever and amen.

In the midst of all this, I read Elizabeth Gilbert’s book, Big Magic.

If you haven’t read it, it is chock-full of sparkly quotes that make any creative person feel as if they are on FIRE.

Like this one:

“Do you have the courage to bring forth this work? The treasures that are hidden inside you are hoping you will say yes.”

Or this one:

“It is only through a human’s efforts that an idea can be escorted out of the ether and into the realm of the actual.”

I have the book on my Kindle and sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I’ll flip through a few chapters in hopes of re-catching that wind of inspiration. And even though time and maturity has encased my writing in a sacredness that I’m thankful for—marking it as something I should do to keep my head on straight rather than something I should do to make money—the sparkly quotes still HIT.

In an early chapter of the book, Gilbert tells the story about a novel she intended to write—that buzzed and buzzed inside her—but after putting it off for too long, she forgot it. It was as if the story had been wiped from her brain. Poof.

But then she went to a writer’s panel and met a fellow author who she immediately clicked with, who told her about an upcoming project she’d just started working on. And as Gilbert listened, she realized…it was her book! Her lost story, found in the mind of someone else!

She wrote:

“I believe that inspiration will always try its best to work with you—but if you are not ready or available, it may indeed choose to leave you and to search for a different human collaborator.”

To this day, this story gives me goosebumps. It’s what makes me write down ideas that pop into my head, in the hopes that they’ll stay with me—my little pals—because I want to be the person that makes them real. It makes me feel a little more special about being creative, because it makes me feel picked by the ideas themselves.

And now: a tiny grenade.

As long as I’ve been writing, I’ve been told that reading makes you a better writer.

But for a long time, I simply didn’t have the patience for books. Or I only read one kind of book because I knew it could hold my attention and, ideally, let me escape from the emotions I had no interest in dissecting.

But over the last decade or so, I have slowly inched my way into reading books that I don’t hide behind but find myself in, books where I’m reading the sentences, not just the words, if that makes sense. Books that make me want to be a better writer, to dig deeper, and to say what I want to say—what I feel only I can say—rather than what I think I’m supposed to say.

And one of the writers that has been helping me do that is Ann Patchett.

After reading Tom Lake on a recommendation from the Bad on Paper podcast, I felt like something switched on inside me, or a door opened. So then I read Bel Canto, and it felt like the door opened even wider, and I became so full of exclamation points that I didn’t have words for.

The best I could figure to do was read the rest of Ann’s fiction, so I made that one of my goals this year. And to let you know how that’s going, I physically hugged The Dutch House when I finished it. Hugged it like it was a human friend.

So it goes without saying that, when I was reading a recent blurb about Elizabeth Gilbert and Big Magic, I was feeling nostalgic until I was hit with the realization that the author that wrote Gilbert’s lost novel was...Ann Patchett.

I did an actual double take, like, what?! My queen, Ann Patchett?? You mean to tell me she was right there at my fingertips all those years ago??

It was one of those moments where you see pieces fall into the right place at the right time. Because I never would have appreciated Ann Patchett’s books back then, wouldn’t have been floored by the way they make my brain make sense because back then, they wouldn’t have.

But the real kicker? The thing that makes me think yeah, there is an undeniable intentionality behind life and all its mysteries? That there is someone at work here, teaching us something, at a pace we are meant to learn it?

The title of that book Ann published, that I just learned this year is State of Wonder.

So yes, I bought a copy. Because somehow this book holds ten years of my writing life in it just by existing. And who knows if I’ll love it the most of any of her books or if I will just think it’s good or fine or not my favorite. But it means something, just to have it, to know all the ways it’s circled around my mind for the last decade, inviting me to become a better writer simply because writing better helps me feel better and listen better and see better and live better and that’s what it’s all about.