A friend asked me this question in an email, and it definitely gave me food for thought. When I was little, I wanted to become a dancer. I also loved to act and make up stories. I don’t mean I lied, but that when I played with my girlfriends, I would give us characters to portray and then make up stories for these ‘cast members’ which we’d then ‘act’ out. Sometimes we’d wear costumes we’d collect at each other’s homes, and sometimes not, but we sure had fun. I can still picture us in my parents’ living room pretending for hours at a time. When I was 18 I was invited into the Martha Graham company , but turned the invite down after much soul searching because I thought my life would be too unbalanced if I accepted. I felt at a loss. Now what? A friend offered me a job writing an article for a New York magazine she edited, and I figured ‘why not?’ I found I enjoyed the process, and several other assignments followed. A short while after that first assignment my husband was offered a job in Los Angeles, and we moved. Again I felt at a loss. Then I asked myself, ‘What does a creative person do in LA?’
By now it should be obvious that the games and tasks I had always been drawn to revolved around the creative. What I chose to do in the new city where I suddenly found myself should come as no surprise . I took out several screenplays from the UCLA library, and again figured ‘why not?’ I wrote a few screenplays but wasn’t sure what to do with them. By that point my husband knew a few writing agents and asked one of them to read a script he thought was promising. Lo and behold the man said he’d represent me. He didn’t actually do much of anything – he certainly didn’t get me a job – but I did have an agent! What followed was very ‘Hollywood’. I met the story editor of ‘The Walton’s’ at a cocktail party and she suggested I come to see her at Warner Brothers if I had any story ideas for the show. I didn’t watch much television but I did watch John-Boy. The woman hired me immediately to write four shows based on those ideas. I was terrified, but my God, I was going to be paid for doing this impractical thing: writing; that I loved doing. To make it even better, Will Gear won an Emmy for one of those scripts.
It would be lovely to say I never looked back, but that isn’t true. Sexism and ageism is still a problem in Hollywood, and was rampant back then. I worked but experienced large gaps between paying jobs. I joined committees to deal with Hollywood’s discrimination problems, but changing hiring practices was a slog. I tried my hand at writing a novel I thought might also make a good movie, and found a New York agent who sold it to Universal. It was never made. I wrote another novel that was never sold. I wrote scripts for several TV movies. Some aired, some did not, but I was paid for all of them. (That was called a development deal in Hollywood back then, and is still a practice there, I hear.) I moved out of state.
By then I was an older woman, so finding actual jobs had become even more difficult. ‘Women’s’ stories were not an easy sell, though what I thought I was suggesting was ‘people’ stories.. Sexism?, you might ask. After several years of struggle, I moved out of state to follow my second husband, which is a whole other story. Hmm. A novel? A movie? A play? This is how my mind works….
Again, I felt at loose ends. One day I sat down at my computer and decided to write about it. Before I realized what I was writing, I found myself in the midst of a memoir. I learned volumes about my choices over the years while I was writing that book, about what mattered to me, where I had screwed up, where I hadn’t, that I had always persevered, which seemed a good thing to me, and on and on. Mostly I came to not only accept myself and my choices, both good and bad, but to like me as well. Not a bad outcome, I decided. I sent the memoir around, but publishers and agents took forever to respond, and I got tired of waiting. I decided to self-publish, which felt like a big deal to me and quite ‘unprofessional’. I did it anyway. The memoir sold locally, and also on Amazon.com, though I sure wouldn’t be able to finance my dotage from the proceeds. Several women wrote or approached me to say how much my memoir had impacted their lives. I had included chapter by chapter questions within it, so that other women might examine their lives as well, creative or not. Then I began to outline another novel, ‘The Girls & Me’. Same process; same outcome.
I spent this past year writing a forty-two chapter novel, which I am reworking. It’s length makes it clear that it’s a ‘book one-book two’ proposition. A college acquaintance said she would try to find me an agent or publisher, but who knows what will happen with that. So here I am, still writing at my computer. Why? I ask myself. Which brings me back to the beginning of this short essay. There is no denying that the writing itself gives me great pleasure. I continue to learn a great deal about myself and what I truly believe through the characters and stories I create. It’s fun! It’s also hard work, and very solitary. It is also still discouraging to find myself with a finished, though always imperfect, product with no outlet for it. I have learned I will persevere nonetheless. If I have to self-publish again, I will. I already have an idea for the next book, nonfiction this time, about living a life with a cup half full or half empty, and what difference that makes in the outcome. At this point, I keep writing because it activates my mind on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. Writing keeps me curious and alive. It fulfills the need in me to express myself in a creative way, and I’m certainly no longer eligible for membership in anyone’s dance company! Bottom line: I’m alive, and writing almost every day, seems to keep me and my life vibrant. So, as I’ve said before, ‘why not’? There are so many reasons ‘why’!
