“Perhaps you are still writing – if so I hope you surrender to it like a forbidden lover.  I hope you steal time, skip work, hide out at the back table of a coffee shop, lie about your whereabouts, lose sleep, bag friends, and let your heart live what it loves,” she said to her brilliant and published friend, who looked as bright as a star, yet was frequently ill.  She knew what all writers know, published or not; that the desire to write is irrational.  You cannot ignore the stories that come to you or decide them away because you are distracted by life’s minutia, any more than you can explain a consuming love. 

The big risk in stopping writing is not that you won’t be published. Today, anybody with a manuscript can be published…there are too many books and too many bad books. (it could be argued that the risk is that you will be published way before the story you are meant to tell is ready.) No, the risk is that you will forget how to surrender to a love bigger than you. That you will continue to resist what writing is – difficult, time consuming, unforgiving, revealing and as tenuous as the first weeks of a love affair, because you are afraid and that kind of fear harms you.

“I never say no to love,” she said as if it were something that appeared outside of her. 

The danger is that you will forget that you were meant to write, period. Not that you are meant to be published or adored or admired for your wit and skill.  But that you will ignore the obvious, that if a story is nagging you, knocking on your dreams and elbowing its way into your free time, that you are meant to tell it.  You will forget that love grows when you say yes to it, because it comes from you. A dull droning on of days from the habit of not allowing that wild chaotic story to express itself – that’s what every writer truly fears.

Because at the end of your life (or at anytime really) do you want to look back and say, “I lived a safe life”? Or do you want to know that you dared walk in the untamed terrain of your imagination?

So say yes to story inside of you that wants to be expressed. If you have to, sneak out late at night after everyone has gone to bed, and get to know her better. Let her tell you her dreams, let her listen to yours, surrender…it’s too late anyway…you are all ready in love.