Andi Cumbo-Floyd - Love Letters to Writers: Encouragement, Accountability, and Truth-Telling

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

Annie Dillard

D ear Beautiful People,

Over two years ago, I started writing weekly letters to the folks in the online writing community I coordinate. (Youre most welcome to join us.) Because I knew these peoplesome of them quite wellthe letters were personal: both for them, as I thought of the moments of their writing lives, and for me, since I knew I could trust them with some of the rawest, most real parts of my life as a writer.

At the suggestion of one of those community members, the talented and kind Amanda Cleary Eastep, I have chosen what I feel are the most powerful, most honest, most vulnerable, most true letters from the more than one hundred I wrote to the community memberswhile slipping a couple from my larger newsletter and blog in there, too.

My wish is that as you read the letters, you will find encouragement, perhaps a little nudge to do your work, and some companionship in your writing journey. There are fifty-two, so you couldif you have far more stamina and patience than Iread one a week. Or you could binge them all in an evening.

Whatever way you read these words, I hope you will take from them hope, comfort, and a little energy to keep at this writing thing.

Much love,

Andi

D ear Beautiful People,

Just now, over the top of our barn and through the pines beyond, the sun is rising in the brightest of yellows against the steel-white winter sky. Hes not shy, this guy. Hes burning with all the brightness he can muster, and we are gratefulfor the way his presence is used to bring us life.

I wonder if maybe the best thing we can do as writers is burn the same way when we draft our work: to let it all go, to write without boundaries, without worrying about who we might burn, about what we look like, about how the light of our words hits someone. We just write wild... big and wild, like a fire.

Ive said it before, and Ill probably say it one thousand timesthe brain is not the place from which we get our best word-energy. That energy lives in the heart; and often, to get at the heart, we have to let our brains take a break, step to the rear, steep in silence a bit. When we are trying to control, manipulate, anticipate, we are thinkingwe are girdingwe are worrying... and worry has no place in the fire of first drafts.

There will be time enough for worry, to gain control, to tame the fire later.

But now, in the first stages of writing, we need to write wild, our arms flung wide as we spin with the words. Wild and free.

So thats my challenge for youlive into that much-rephrased axiom of writing: write hot; edit cold. In that draft, let your characters, your language, your passion, your emotion burn white hot. Later, you can come apply the cool, controlled light of reason. But now, let it all go. Be wild. Big and wild.

What keeps you from writing wild in your drafts? What holds you back? What do the ugly voices whisper? What might it feel like to let go?

Much love,

Andi

D ear Beautiful People,

Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the US. Its one of my favorite holidays, because it honors a man who fought to do great good and who still made big mistakes. I appreciate a person who is real, especially in our glossy times.

Ive been thinking about this gloss, that black-and-white thinking, if youll forgive the pun on such a day, that need to have precision and answers and do this instead of try this.

We live in unforgiving times, and that rigid get it right the first time mindset can silence writers quicker than almost anything. I expect you all know that.

So heres my challenge to you: write in the betweens, the spaces between right and wrong, the intervals between do this and not that. Write in the liminal openings that exist in gray at some times and in rainbow colors of magnificence at others.

As you look back at your life for your memoir, give yourself grace for your mistakes and lay them out for the reader. Dont disguise them as half-truths or veil them under the bravado of false righteousness.

As you lean into your characters, give them openings where they can show they are whole in their brokenness. Let them make bad choices and then regret their actions, and let them love imperfectly.

As you craft poems from twigs and tinfoil, let the disruption of rhythm and rhyme bounce you and your readers to higher understanding. Choose just the wrong word from time to time.

As you build books to help other people, admit the gaps in your knowing, show your work, forgive your mistakes so that the people you advise will forgive their own.

Not a one of us does this living perfectlyDr. King plagiarized his dissertation and had a pretty wretched series of relationships with women other than his wife, and yet, that does not diminish the power of his words when he says, Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness.

Dangerously unselfish, my friends. I think thats what we need to be as writers. People not interested in girding up our rightness or projecting some false sense of correctness. People interested, instead, in digging into the meaty betweens where beauty and pain rub shoulders, and where truth and forgiveness are bedfellows.

Where might you need to let yourself fall further into the betweens? Where might you need to peel back either-or and settle for, well, just this?

Much love,

Andi

D ear Beautiful People,

I have this chaira reclinerwhere I sit to sew. I call it my nest. My mom had one, and now Ive followed in her footsteps. A good lamp. My sewing basket and lots of yarn at hand. A blanket. And right now, the spring seed catalogs are stacked next to it, too. Its my comfortable spot, my refuge.

Sometimes, Id rather not leave it. I can read there, sew there, watch TV there, even sleep there if need be. Its molded to me now... It holds me up in the easiest way.

Lately, my chair has been beckoning more and more, because Im doing something that is uncomfortable and really quite hard for me: Im publishing a book.

Im a writer. I enjoy time alone. I like to ruminate and stew and ponder. I enjoy hours of solitude when I can work and think and stare out the window. In many, many ways, I like to be hidden.