Lisa Ellison is an editor, writing coach, and speaker with an Ed.S. in Clinical Mental Health Counseling and a background in mindfulness. She has spent the last two decades helping clients and students turn different experiences into art and currently teaches courses in memoir, creative nonfiction, and mindful writing practices. Her life story and essays have appeared on NPR’s With Good Reason and in Hippocampus Literary Magazine, Kenyon Review Online, Huffington Post, and The Guardian, among others. For more information, check out her website. Lisa is also an instructor from Encore! Master Class: Writing the Tough Stuff: When, Why, and How to Tackle Painful Material.LE: When I was five, I wrote a play and then invited all the kids in my neighborhood to attend my one-and-only performance. I promised handfuls of candy to would-be audience goers, which was risky because I lived in a candy-free household. Several kids pre-warned me that failure to deliver the goods would result in a beat down. Fortunately, they liked the play enough to forget about beating me up. After that experience, I was hooked on storytelling.
But it wasn’t until my high school creative writing teacher asked if I would publish under my real name or a pen name that I realized I could become a writer.
JRW: What would you say is your most interesting writing quirk?
LE: I write while listening to classical music. I revise while listening to heavy metal.
JRW: What is one of the most surprising things you learned in creating your books?
LE: When you write and revise a story, it’s completely yours. You get to create it, shape it, and hold on to all of its meaning and power. Once something’s published, the story no longer belongs to you. Readers get to decide what it means and how they’ll use it.
Because this is the case, it’s important to do three things.
- Take all the time to get your story right.
- Take care of yourself when you publish your work. The act of publishing will make you feel all your feels from relief that your hard work finally paid off and elation that people like your story to doubt that it’s as good as it can be and fear that someone might hate or misinterpret your work.
- Prepare for the grief that follows the elation of publishing. This is just the process of letting go so you can become quiet and still enough to hear the next story you need to write.
LE: To become a writer, there’s only one requirement: sit down and write.
To write well, you must be willing to do it poorly. That means giving yourself permission to write Anne Lamott’s shitty first drafts. It also means being humble enough to revise your work.
People who don’t follow their passions will discourage you from becoming a writer. They’ll say it’s too hard to make money as an artist or they’ll remind you that the competition is fierce. They’ll tell you to be practical and tout the importance of having backup plans. They’ll question the time you spend on your projects and use every rejection as proof that you’re wasting your time.
These people aren’t living their fullest lives, so don’t let them limit yours.
If you’re called to write, sit down and write. Do it for the joy and the heartache. Do it because, on the last day of your life, you want to be able to say you truly lived, and even if that novel you wrote didn’t get picked up by a major publisher, you actually wrote it and that alone is a minor miracle.
This is not to suggest that “if you just write it, then publishers (and money) will come.” You’ll probably need a job other than a writer to pay the bills, and yes, rejections will sting. Sometimes you’ll question why you do this. But if writing is your calling, spending regular time with your muse will allow you to live fully and joyfully no matter what you write about.