As a young girl, my mother wanted to be an author. When I was twelve or so, and fired up about becoming a writer myself, I asked her why she’d never pursued this dream. To her credit, she did not point out, as she might reasonably have done, that she had seven kids, (one of whom was disabled), helped run my dad’s real estate business and kept a huge old house so clean you could eat off the floors, leaving little time for writing.
Instead, she took my question for what it was, a request to know what might get in the way of my own journey to being an author. She said it was because she didn’t have the education to be a writer. She had graduated salutatorian from her tiny high school near Richmond, Kentucky, a circumstance that frustrated her because if she hadn’t had the second best grades in her class she would have been class poet, a title much more to her liking. She’d also done a year of nursing school at Berea College, the tuition-free Kentucky college dedicated to offering an education to the children of coal miners. But she hadn’t studied writing.
She said there was a lot more to being a good author than loving to read and being good in English class. Despite her other responsibilities, she was a prodigious reader, plowing through Frank Yerby and Daphne Du Maurier and all of Mazo do la Roche’s Jalna chronicle, along with romantic suspense luminaries like Mary Stewart, Phyllis Whitney and Victoria Holt. I followed in her footsteps, reading several books a week through middle school and high school, but she said that wasn’t enough.
I was pretty sure she was wrong. There were plenty of famous writers who’d never gone to college–Mark Twain, Ray Bradbury, Beatrix Potter and Truman Capote, to name a few.
So after I dropped out of Indiana University, where I was a journalism major, I tried my hand at writing a few novels. I got precisely nowhere, because that’s where my plots went–nowhere. Even today it feels like I should have been able to analyze my favorites among the hundreds of books that I’d read and figure out what made them tick, but I never got past being so carried away by the story that I forgot to look under the covers.
Like my mother before me, my life got caught up in raising and providing for a family, and it wasn’t until I was in my late fifties that I went back to college–McDaniel College, in Baltimore–and learned how plots are supposed to work. Since then, I’ve published two books and expect to publish three more this year.
Right again, Mom.
I watched some of the American election returns on Tuesday night, and since then I’ve been struggling to put words on the page. I’ve been upset and depressed and paralyzed. Writing is usually my stress reducer. What can I do?
I write best in my writing cave, a 9.5′ x 11′ room that was added onto the back of my 97- year-old house in the 1950’s or 60’s (along with an extra bathroom/laundry room and a ridiculously useless hallway that I’ve converted into a mudroom/cloakroom/ ironing room).
because my kids are grown, I currently have no pets, and my husband is a very low-maintenance kind of guy. But it’s partly because the room is really well-suited to writing. It has space for my ancient desktop computer (if all you use is Word, Excel and Chrome, you don’t really need a state-of-the-art computer), a couple of printers (one black-and-white laser printer and a color multi-function device that scans and makes copies, and a couple of fairly up-to-date laptops that I use when I travel.
Or 50, or 60, or 70—or even older.
Eight Ladies Writing 
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