Dear One,
There you sit at your little desk in your room, pressed into the corner so that the curtain rubs your right shoulder. Your hair falls in your face and you brush it away, impatient.
This is important work, and you mustn’t be bothered.
It doesn’t occur to you as your pencil moves across the page in loops and crosses and letter Is dotted with hearts that this might be worthless drivel, a story no one will want to read. Of course they will want to read it! Of course they will, because YOU wrote it.
You reach the bottom of the notebook paper and flip the page over, new pencil lines crisscrossing the dents made on the other side. What is this story about? Likely a little girl, probably eight years old, who had a dream come true. A role in a Star Wars movie, or a pony delivered by truck to her doorstep. An adventurous family vacation, perhaps without her annoying younger brother. (And certainly her parents won’t be arguing.) A bully defeated, a new friend made. Because even at this young age, you are writing to uncover your place in the world, how you came to be here and where you will go next.
(Spoiler alert: this searching will never stop, evident even in your fiction. Your imagination is only an inch wide but miles and miles deep.)
You’re at the end of the page now, adding a small doodle in the margins but no more, because already you’ve internalized that drawing isn’t something you’re good at. Your best friend is good at it; she draws cats and dogs and clouds shaped like flowers. You’ve discussed writing a book together; you could write and she could illustrate. To you, this seems like an unfair balance of effort. Yet you will do it anyway, because your friend wants you to.
The most writing you get to do at school is sentences made up of spelling words. You get as creative as you can. The SCHOOL bus went AROUND the corner and crashed INTO the HOUSE before flipping OVER. Your paper returns with the words Very Good! scrawled across the top, and you beam.
But at home, you are free from the constraints of arbitrary assignments. You can write whatever your heart desires. You push your hair aside again, pull another page from the drawer and continue your story.
You will be an author when you grow up. This you know with complete certainty.
Except…
Listen, sweet pea, this is hard for me, because I see you in your relentless optimism and I don’t want to deflate it. You, like all children, believe that all you have to do is say I’m going to be a _______ and that is what you will become. But you will be a million things, and days will fill with nothing of consequence and everything that matters, and then one day you will blink and realize that years - so, so many of them - have gone by. You will blink and realize that not only have you lost the thread of your childhood dream, but also the thread connecting you to this beautiful little girl with her head bent over the page at the little desk in the corner. And you will weep, afraid that it’s too late.
But I want to tell you something. It took me a while, but I see it now. All it requires is remembering to bring you along.
Take my hand, my love. We have stories to tell.