When I considered preparing for a book launch talk to be customary, as I had been talking about my debut novel, The Wisdom of the Willow, for some time now, it wasn’t. I had been preparing answers for questions when I realized I had been playing it safe with my writing. Over the past twenty years, I have been a writer of memoir and the personal essay, composing along a smooth non-fiction road with no bumps or turns. After all, I was secure there, growing familiar with the writing of what I knew, of writing reflection, and takeaways for readers, and honing skills.

There’s a lot to say about playing it safe.

Who doesn’t want to be comfortable, especially now in a world of complication? The fear and anxiety about anything new can set us into an emotional wreck. We naturally seek safety when feeling threatened, and desire comfort when our emotions become too much to handle. The familiar is an elixir for our anxious selves; it is what we can expect. Perhaps it is a fear of what lies ahead, an unknown territory that holds us back and keeps us in retreat.

When I would tell anyone that I am a writer, the assumption was that I write fiction. I’d raise a hand as if to stop them there, as I just don’t write fiction. It is too daunting; I’d have to make things up. I wondered if my playing it safe had backfired, if the label—memoirist, essayist—was typecasting me into a role I would or could never get out of. Maybe I had diminished my writerly potential. But as a writer, I want to challenge myself to not only read outside of my genre but also to write outside of it. I had dropped the teetering thinking from non-fiction to fiction writing as the back and forth were not productive.

Until a walk in the woods changed the path of my writing.

 

In my last post, I wrote about the power of story and how the natural world shows. I used the example of a walk one morning in the woods when I veered off a walking path to a little bridge and peered down to a branch of the Chicago River below where sun beams spiked the water’s surface, creating sparkles — like diamonds. I stood awhile to imagine a boy with a long stick poking the river’s banks unaware, his father perhaps seeing a different perspective than I, or a big sister who had experienced the illusion and wanted to show a little magic to her younger brother. As I walked back home, I had the awe-inspiring connection with the natural world in my mind, thinking I had been in the right place at the right time, and that there was a story there to be told.

As I prepared to answer a question of how I came to write fiction that may be raised during the book launch, I realized my answer was found standing on that bridge. If I hadn’t changed my familiar walking course along a path to a place unknown, I would not have experienced a sight that sparked my imagination. When I returned home, I wrote a short story about a boy, his older sister, and a river that sparkled like diamonds, which was later published.

I learned I didn’t have to make everything up to write fiction. The places I visited and the awe-inspiring moments of genuine connections with the natural world were actual experiences that not only have a place in memoir and personal essay but also in fictional stories.

We owe it to ourselves to take a walk out of the comfort and security that has grown with us over the years, like any childhood blanket that has wrapped us in familiarity. We need to be fearless in finding our places and who we are meant to be, as we will never know what magic is possible when seeing the sun kiss a river.