Emily Fridlund

The first novel I ever wrote was a sprawling saga about a family of rabbits, a Watership Down knockoff composed in yellow legal pads on my parents’ screened-in porch. I remember the bright green carpet, the sharp autumn light, some kind of snack at my elbow. I was in second grade, and the only thing I understood about novels was that they required chapters. And the only thing I understood about chapters was that they were like slices, like pie, which I imagined divided and divided up again into servings of equal sizes. I decided that my rabbit novel could only be a novel if it contained chapters of four pages each. If I had more to say than that I would simply have to fit it in tiny cramped lettering at the end of each chapter’s fourth page.  

Which is to say, as a writer I have always craved structure. I’m always putting up scaffolding around everything I write, making up new rules for myself to follow. To this day I often convince myself that the key to writing my next novel is breaking it into three sections, or twelve chapters for the months of the year, or alternating voices between first person and third. I crave structure, and yet when I think back to what made me want to write in the first place, what made me think I even could, I think of JoAnne Farley and rush writing. I had the honor of being taught by JoAnne for all six years of elementary school, back when the Continuous Progress program was two rooms in a lonely wing at Cornelia school, a Little Kids’ and Big Kids’ room. JoAnne wore long gingham dresses and made us old-fashioned fudge and had us do what she called “rush writing.” “Write anything that comes into your mind as fast as you can,” she would say, to a class of six- and seven- and eight-year-olds. So we’d hunch over our desks with our tightly gripped pencils until our wrists were sore, until we were wagging them in the air for relief. What I mean is that JoAnne let us be writers as the way we became literate. There was never any excuse not to write. We told stories and she wrote them down; we chose books from the school library that were so hard to read we had to skip half the words; we rush wrote our way through misspellings and bad handwriting and repetition and nonsense. All of it. “Just write,” she would say. “Write anything, as fast as you can.”

I teach writing at the college level now, and I still make my students do free writing. I’m still trying to help them see that there is no other way to be a writer than to write. “The secret to writing is writing,” Ursula K. Le Guin has said, wisely, infuriatingly—because it’s no secret at all. My undergraduates want to know what tricks I used to get my own books started; they expect to hear that you can’t be a writer until you’ve read Middlemarch or Ulysses; that you can’t be a real writer unless you’ve gotten an MFA or done X amount of research or gotten an agent, sold a book. But so much of what I understand about writing comes from sitting alone, and panicking, and writing anyway. Writing isn’t about finishing and publishing books, though I’ve written a couple now, because books end, don’t they? They go out into the world, and then you’re left alone again with your blank yellow legal pad on your parents’ darkening porch. Your blinking curser, your ridiculously planned-out chapters, your doubt, your doubt. Being a writer, if that means anything to me at all, means working out the world, one word at a time—slowly, then faster and faster—in language. JoAnne was my first and best teacher of this, but I also owe a debt to English teacher Betsy Cussler in high school, who led a small group of us in an independent study my senior year, and I cherish the handful of college professors who pointed me at a subject and said, essentially, “Just think about it in words.” I still do this. I still fill up notebooks I’ll probably never share. I still set the timer for ten minutes, and go.