Update: Done! A complete draft with as much love, research, drama and craft as I could squeeze in–or out. I spent so much time with my characters that when I had to kill one off I slipped into a state of grief. Then I realized yet another chapter was a wrap and felt better. Being so inside the story for that many hours a day was excruciatingly exciting, like an ongoing hallucination.

Full disclosure: I missed my deadline by two days and did wear the Cone of Shame but the reduced range of vision helped me from getting distracted and possibly chewing off a limb in frustration–an advantage a vet would have pointed out to me. I pretty much didn’t leave my writing room (aka pen) until I typed the last word, so it didn’t matter any way.

Next: More sleep, less chocolate, more showers, less coffee, more playing with my kids, less whining about the book.

————

As of this writing, I have 12 days, 9 hours and 42 minutes left to push out the mother of all drafts of my first novel. I have a deadline I imposed upon myself and told everyone about—even you—so that I have no choice to finish it or wear the CONE OF SHAME.  (See item 6 below for more on my convoluted but, I think, effective logic on how to trick yourself into doing what’s good for you even when it feels bad and, yes, even ridiculous.)

Sharing what I now know about birthing a book while counting my breaths (or pages) is not perhaps the best use of my time, but in the 17 minutes between contractions, I’ll share a few manic observations you won’t find in What to Expect When You Are Expecting Your Novel:

1. Post-Its are your friend and your enemy.  (See below photo of my study wall.)

2. Bathing is a privilege not a right.  If you don’t shower in the morning, you can make it a reward for getting in a few more hours (or days) work.

3. Don’t read all the beautiful passages, chapters or characters you have to cut and kill off in your quest to find “the heart of your story.”  It will bring on crying jags, and you’ll lose precious writing time.

4. As for your garden: What garden?

5. As for your children: What children?

6. Answer no calls or emails before you finish another chapter. I have no internet in my study right now.  It can be done.  You can booby trap your own dang self.  When a friend of mine quit smoking (note I did not say tried to quit smoking), she used this method: She put three cigarettes in a paper lunch sack. She wrote an elaborately timed system for when she could have her next cigarette, which she put into another paper sack.  She bought a pack of gum to get her through the in between times, and she put that in a third paper sack.  She kept a system for when she could chew the gum in another paper sack.  There were more paper bags she carried around, one probably holding a master schedule for all the bags.  Okay, I’ve forgotten what the goal was?  Oh yeah, staying off the internet.*

7. Do whatever it takes to stay in the chair.  I’ve never been able to write while listening to music until now.  I’ve never been able to write while holding my pee until now.  I’ve never been able to make it a whole morning on three almonds and tepid coffee made the day before until now.   I have a dear friend who tied herself to a chair when writing papers in graduate school (you know who you are) and I used to find that a little disturbing until now.**

8. More last minute research?  Oh no you don’t.

9. There are passages in this draft that a monkey could write better, a blindfolded, drunk monkey, and yet oddly enough I find these places in the book provide me with a whole new sense of beauty and, best of all, they often come near the end of a chapter, which means I can call it good enough and start on another chapter. (Screw “art” and the arty artful artists who taught me otherwise).

10. Give up all sense of control beyond the systems you already have in place.  Example: rearranging your post-it notes at the last minute is note a good idea. (See item #1)

11. Exhaustion is not a bad thing.  At some point on your eighth day in the eighth hour, when you have given up all punctuation, when your characters are either a) actually now sitting in the room  talking to you or b) cartoons on the level of Scooby Doo, your inhibitions will be so far gone that your story will move you, the whole notion of storytelling will be an utter gas, and you will have reached a state along the lines of nirvana or enlightenment. At the least you will have a clear clean sense that this baby is coming, one way or another, perfect or not.  The fantasy of what you’d hoped it would be will be supplanted completely by what you are capable of and you won’t care the two won’t match because you’ll be done.

12. Time’s up.   Back to work.  No catchy ending here.  I’m saving that for the novel.

*When I do check my email, I always hope I will find a full, polished draft of my book attached to a message I’ve sent myself.  I should probably see a therapist about this delusion, but by the time I will manage to make the appointment, I will have sent myself the real book.  (See above on desperate logic that gets it done.)

**There are a number of images of being bound showing up in this draft of the book.  I’d elaborate on that, but I’m a bit tied up at the moment.

I keep this photo of my dad on my writing desk. We lost him six weeks ago.

My dad was not a good listener when I was young. Hilarious, quick, smart, a big talker and impatient, he was always a presence. He became a father when he was 18, and the responsibility of it never quite set right. Much later, after he quit drinking and joined AA, he got better at slowing down enough to listen to his wife and kids. After he was diagnosed with lung cancer when in his sixties, he grew quieter and seemed to absorb the world around him in a simultaneously startled and patient way.

He loved stories and country music, which explains his endearingly maudlin side and why he liked long conversations with strangers in small town bars, the juke box blaring Hank Williams or Charlie Pride. When I was in fourth grade I wrote an O’Henry-ish story about a girl who doesn’t like her little sister. The younger sister has a mental disability and the older girl is ashamed of her. When the little sister dies suddenly, she leaves a sign—a special leaf—meant to show she still loved her big sister. One day I came home from school to find my dad with those three wide-ruled notebook pages in his hands. He had deciphered my barely discernable pencil scratches.

“Did you write this?” he asked me.
I nodded.
“This is good. I liked it.”

The way to my father’s heart was through a song or story, I realized quickly enough, and the sadder the better. After that I wrote poems and more stories and kept a slew of uneven journals. There was a lot of sadness in those pages, and some of it caused by him. Most of these writings I did not share with my dad. A few he read, never critically, which was at variance with the rest of the time I saw him, tense encounters as he struggled with alcoholism, the loss of his own father to cancer, his own sense of failure and dissatisfaction, the stress of raising three kids born by the time he was 21. He was often so far into his head that he could be in a room full of people and not hear a word they said to him. I remember tapping his arm to be heard, the way he could turn away while I was mid-sentence. I learned to keep a safe distance.

When I was in college and taking writing classes, he handed me two stories he wrote himself. One was about his Dutch grandfather, historical and detailed, and the other about a woman around my mother’s age. One day, while her teenage daughter is at school,the woman puts on her daughter’s clothes and sets out on an afternoon of adventure and mishap. The story was quirky and smart. I think he sent the story out to a magazine and got a rejection. I don’t know what happened to either of those stories. I’d love to have them now. Somewhere in his things is also a notebook with country songs he penned, his guitar on his lap.

I have few memories of conversations with my dad in which he listened to me. During those rare exchanges, I rushed through explanations while I still had his attention. He did like telling me things. All of my boyfriends were recipients of his theories on politics, hunting, developments in science, and occasionally women. He was funny, though, which offset his sadly sentimental and remote sides and left us with a lot of silly memories. We have oft-used one-liners in the family that he crafted on camping trips and were sure to send us howling with laughter in our tent. He also entertained us by making animals out of mashed potatoes at dinner, but that would take an elaborate series of photos to explain.

When I read aloud my fiction for the first time I was graduating with my master’s degree in creative writing and defending my thesis. I stood in front of sixty people (okay, maybe more like twenty) in a campus classroom. My friends coached me to slow down—I had and still have a tendency to talk fast when the spotlight is on me. I had decided upon a short story I wrote about a daughter who leaves her father. When I look at it now, I can see all the parts I would revise or cut, a few sentimental lines that embarrass me. My parents were in the audience that day and sitting modestly toward the back for the room. The father in the story was nothing like my dad, and the daughter nothing like me—this I had been sure about when while I wrote the piece–and yet as I read it aloud I had the choking revelation that I had been trying to forgive my father and myself for what could not be fixed between us. The awareness my dad was hearing me share this story with him and a room of people made my hands shake. I struggled to maintain my voice. When I finished, I looked up to see he was crying. Big, sappy tears of pride, sadness and happiness rolled down his face.

I snapped that photo of my dad last summer. He was leaning into the minivan to say goodbye to my daughters and me. We’d come from Oregon to Michigan to see him and my mom. A few months later he would not be able to walk any more without assistance and pain and morphine would take the clarity from his eyes. His ability to listen attentively, to be completely there with us in a room would never be back. A few minutes after I took that shot, I drove away. He stood there in the yard for as long as he could still see me and my girls, his arm up in the air, staring hard at us. Sentimental and beautiful as hell.

One of my dad’s favorite songs.
Willie Nelson’s Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vi__gd84XI&feature=related

“I notice that it is only when my mother is working in her flowers that she is radiant, almost to the point of being invisible except as Creator: hand and eye. She is involved in work her soul must have. Ordering the universe in the image of her personal conception of Beauty.
– Alice Walker—In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens

It’s that time of year again, a good many of us down in the dirt and dreaming big. As usual when my knees hit the mud for this first time, I long to have my grandmothers back. I’d settle those two hard-working, Midwest anchors of my childhood on lawn chairs in the middle of my freshly turned beds, the ghosts of my past surrounded by the fantasy of the yield to come.

I miss those ladies. Once my hands are free to dig—no writing on the computer, no marking papers or editing, no doing anything but going into the earth–the grief I store up in pockets all winter comes out. I hack at those weeds in a way that feels personal. The earth gets a good beating, and the scent and feel of soil takes me back to when I was small and left to dig and make mud in yards where there was always somebody nearby. Ours was a raucous and constantly shifting network of siblings, mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents. I must have assumed it would always be that way.

What I wouldn’t give to look up from setting in new seeds and be able to ask those two matriarchs, “What did you do with your hands that made you truly happy?” I honestly have no idea what they would say, and not knowing that about them seems like the saddest thing.

We feel close to people when we see or experience what they create. Every day I ask my children, “What do you want to make?” I sign them up for painting or dancing or piano lessons. I look for their personalities and their futures in what they love to do. My students and friends are always deep inside some process or another, writing, painting, building. The meals we make for each other are lovely and exotic, the wine discussed as if it were a poem. We love people for what they do for others, but we fall in love with them based on what they do for themselves.

My grandmothers did not romanticize gardens or knitting or any of the “hobbies” I indulge in when I am not tapping my lily white and pampered fingers on the keyboard. (That I write and read other people’s writing for a living would amuse them.) After marrying my grandfather and leaving the family farm, my father’s mother worked the line at General Motors for 28 years. She dipped her fingers in motor oil, lifting and sorting car parts until she ached. She did get to wear plastic gloves though, so no stains. My mother’s mother had hands abraded and veined from heavy kitchen work and tending children. Her right pinky finger was crushed permanently flat after she caught it in the wringer washing machine. My grandparents made the bulk of their livelihoods from building and repairing automobiles. They planted flowers along the edges of their yards, usually petunias, sweet williams or begonias, and that was that. Theirs were simple homes with little art or time for it. There were too many people to feed and clothe and keep healthy.

I imagine my grandmothers–one tall and lean, the other soft and round–in my Oregon yard, pointing out a weed I missed and getting a kick out of the things my kids say. I miss the good natured teasing and oft repeated stories that both women resorted to in order to keep the multitude of their descendents in our places while at work on some necessary job or another. They both liked to laugh, my mother’s mother hunched over with her hands on her knees, my father’s mother with her head thrown back, whooping. It was impossible not to join in when she got going.

When my father’s mother died, I selected as a keepsake a battered red mixing bowl she used to make fudge. She was particular and indulgent on the item of sweets. I remember the thermometer, her modulated voice explaining to me the science of candy making, her delight when appreciative guests asked for more. I got her bag of yarn, too, mostly because no one else wanted it. She used to crotchet padded clothes hangers–pretty things to hang in closets, where no one would see them, of course. I was delighted to find at that bottom of her bag a pile of butterscotch hard candy she was not supposed to eat in her last years because of her diabetes. She sneaked while she worked. I keep the candy there as good luck charms.

From my mother’s mother I have a bedspread that took her five years to make. By the time she completed it, the instructions were held together with yellowed cellophane tape. She crotched 159 three-dimensional pink roses, 18 petals each, every flower set into a lacey square, each square woven into the next. The thread was thin and easily tangled. It was likely the most impractical thing she ever did. The spread needed repairing even before she finished the last row.

She no doubt agonized over what she had gotten herself into with the project and thought a good many times about giving up. I’m guessing she kept on because she visualized tying the final knot and laying her masterpiece upon the old mattress. I wish I had been with her at that moment to see her face. The roses and the intricate pattern holding them together seem as fine as any bloom or design I can put in my garden or might write. I keep the spread on my own bed now. If I hold my head just right, my eye even with the flowers my grandmother made, I can see a landscape I like to think she wished would go on forever.

I type this surrounded by the following: A bright red construction paper card made by my 11-year-old that says “You are the best mom ever” in both English and Egyptian heiroglyphics, a “calendula plant” (my 7-year-old explains) in a handmade planter with a paper flag set into it that says, “Happy Mothers Day, Moma” (sic) and decorated with designs that look a lot like the tattoos she wants. My 4-year-old has made me a “flower breakfast” with camellias and tulips she picked from the yard. I note she’s chosen a martini glass. That’s my girl.

Mother’s Day is inspiration for more of the same around here (and I’m not referring to the martini glass, specifically). On the table are also sodden water colors, blue fish being the latest obsession. A cartoonish, supersize bouquet of skinny balloons is jammed into a vase—balloon bending went on under the table until late last night. My oldest is tapping out “Ode to Joy” on the piano, and each note is singular and a surprise. She actually likes practicing. Who knew? My middle girl has made a peanut butter bagel and dropped it face down on the floor by my feet. I should stop to pick it up. However, I am writing, so it can wait.

What they don’t tell you about parenting, or maybe they do but nobody really listens to anything about parenting before they are parents (as my own dear mother has reminded me), is that on good days, on the best days, you will be the recipient and facilitator of miniature people’s creative work and, if you can ignore the bagel smooshed three inches from your feet, they will return you the favor and provide you with precious inspiration. Yes, your children will do this for you, these same people who for a good many years you despair will not learn to say all the letters of the alphabet, wipe after going potty, or find the correct words to thank you (just two!) for any number of times you’ve saved them from, well, just about everything.

Last night, after said artists were in bed, I was reading Elaine Pagel’s Gnostic Gospels, which is not easy reading after a day with children, but it was closest to my hand when I lay down. I had checked it of out the library because I don’t know much about the Gnostics, except they have a history of irritating a good many religious folk. This morning, while considering the speed with which my daughters create, the ephemeral quality of so much of what they make and yet how complete their absorption and pleasure while they do it, I leafed back to something that had struck me the night before: Some of the Gnostics believed making art is a way of knowing oneself, and to know oneself is to achieve knowledge about the depth of all things. This act of making, those radicals asserted, was to find the Spirit that already inhabited one. It was a terribly simple formula and yet so hard for most people to accept. These expressions need not be elaborate, ritualized creations. They need only be true to what you hear within yourself at that moment.

In the card she gave me this morning, my middle daughter wrote, “I love you, Moma” (sic) in dark crayon. She loves to slide up against me, my little bean pole, and for me to whisper that I love her, just as I did a few minutes ago. When I say it, I mean it. From my lips into her ears passes what lies deep in my heart, the gratitude, the adoration, the most basic key to what makes every day worth it. I can’t find better words at these moments, and she does not care. She loves me, too. I know it. She sweated it out over those letters.

Two days ago my dad died. My last words to him were: “I love you, Dad.” His answer was, “I love you too, kid.” Both of us uttered the last thing people can think to say when our hearts are burst open. His words, fleeting and beautiful to me, were the embodiment of what it means to adore and let go of what you adore, to hear what you feel within, present it, and know what you manage to bring forth will be received in the spirit with which it was given: Childlike, immediate, and pure. It is very simple, I’m thinking this morning, as I type this.

“If only she could put them together, she felt, write them out in some sentence, then she would have got at the truth of things.”
–Virginia Woolf. To the Lighthouse.

I bought my most beautiful edition of Virginia Woolf’s work in China. I found it in new bookstore on a busy, hot street in Chengdu, a city I had lived in 10 years earlier. Chengdu had radically modernized since I had last seen it. At the same time dear old friends and some of the rich street life were gone. At the orphanage where I had helped over the years, I saw much was also improved for the children. Fewer orphans were arriving at their gates, but the little beds were now increasingly filled with children with profound disabilities, fragile kids with daunting needs.

My return to China was both exciting and sad. Mostly it was disorienting, and so the English section of the bookstore was the natural place to take refuge. As soon as I walked in, I impulsively reached for a paperback copy of Virginia Woolf’s Selected Works, which featured a cover photo of Woolf when she was twenty years old and everything lay yet ahead of her. The volume itself weighed a shocking amount, at least 5 pounds—no sensible traveler would consider packing it. But the minute I opened the 1100 page book and it fell open to one of Woolf’s incomparable sentences, the swoop and repetition, the longing to capture and understand, I had to have it.

I carried my discovery back to my hotel the way I would a scroll painting or a jade antique, a great find at a good price. Then I lay down in my hotel bed, the sounds of China outside my window, and read. Every few minutes I would stop, pick up my pen and write. The complexity of what I was experiencing began to spill out on the page.

Reading Woolf at difficult times has become automatic for me. The character Laura Brown in Michael Cunningham’s novel The Hours carries Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway with her to a hotel to read alone. Laura, suffocating in her role as mother and wife and not understanding why, imagines she will take her own life that day. In the early drafting of Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf thought her character Clarissa Dalloway would struggle with suicide but as the book developed her internal suffering is taken on by another character, whose choice to kill himself presages the decision that Woolf years later will make for herself. The desire to get “at the truth of things” through language goes beyond a wish to summarize the significance of an event or to even find comfort—although it is a delight when either of those things happens, too. The urgency that underlies this effort to still and then illuminate moments in Woolf’s novels reflects the impossible: Our attempt to stop time in order to more fully live and understand it through language.

I filled a notebook in that hotel in China, and from it came fiction that, more than five years later, has finally taken on the shape of a novel. Lily Briscoe in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse spends years on a single painting. She is young when she begins, unsure of herself, vulnerable to the constant interruptions and influences of others. Often she wishes to be alone, but at the same time she draws from the people around her because they, too, are part of her experience. Lily meets frustration repeatedly in the pursuit of her work. She cannot find the answers, the right way to properly capture what unfolds for her as she paints and ages. “The question was of some relation between those masses. She had borne it in her mind all these years.”

Every morning when I sit down to write I am hopeful that this is the day it all comes together, that I will have found a way to make the portion of the story I am working on reveal what rings true for me, to go as far as possible toward a meaning I am often racing to grasp. Of Lily, Woolf writes, “It seemed as if the solution had come to her: she knew what she had to do.” But it will be a good many more pages and more stops and starts before Lily would be able to finish. Much like Lily, a writer grapples with mistakes and with miss-starts, often for a very long time, and then there is the moment of arrival: A sentence snaps into place, a chapter breathes life into the character, and a draft of a book—reeking with errors and ridiculous in places–prints out before her. Buried in the jumble, there is meaning, although it will take many more hours of work before she can make it come out clean.

Woolf’s novels read like internal conversations she is having with herself as much as with her readers about why human beings create, how the impulse and practice can shape who we are, be key to mental and emotional survival. What matters above all else, Woolf seems to say in her novels, is that we honor the need to try.

At the end of To the Light House, Lily puts the final stroke upon her painting. For a shimmering moment in the very last paragraph her picture hangs complete in the mind of the reader. Lily’s painting, like Woolf’s novel, is the best she can do to bring it all together—her life, those she loved and lost, the place where it happened, those impossible years. “It would be hung in the attics, Lily thought; it would be destroyed. But what did it matter? . . . I have had my vision.”

It is the best of times and the worst of times—if you are a woman writer, that is. More women than ever are embracing the writing life. More women then men take part in writing workshops, writing conferences and informal writing groups. They are producing a substantial number of words and are finding print or online venues to publish their work. However here’s the sad fact: Few women writers appear to be taken seriously where it may count. According to a recent study by VIDA, the new organization that evaluates the critical and cultural conversations on writing by women, the most prominent magazines in literary art show a stark lack of articles, essays or fiction written by women:

http://vidaweb.org/the-count-2010

The pie charts in the Vida study are an overwhelming shade of red, the color denoting work by men the magazines have published or books by men the magazines have reviewed.

In a good many cases we’re looking at over 70 percent male, even 80 percent male in some of the most established and respected purveyors of literary art. Poetry is the only area where there appears to be some equity.

What do to about this? I suppose women could say who cares and make a blood pact to read only other women. They would still be well read–exceptionally well read. (My bedside table is loaded with books by women I long to have time to read. Seriously, who has time for men?)

But how in the 21st century was this happening right under our noses? These results are a surprise, unless of course you are a woman trying to publish. A number of writers and editors are chewing over those numbers and offer reasons for this striking inbalance:

Ruth Franklin at the New Republic owns up to her own low numbers.

Jessica Crispin on NPR goes to editors for more answers

Laura Miller at the NY Times says men don’t care

Rob Spillman Editor of Tin House says he does in fact care

Annie Finch says here’s how magazines can do better

The Southern Review says they are doing better and show their own numbers

Katha Pollit at Slate says more women editors would be the best start

Eileen Myles cuts to the quick of it, as only a poet can

I’ll summarize their assertions and other critics on the dismal numbers in “the count” as follows:

Women don’t submit as much work to magazines as men. Magazines edited by men seem to publish more men. Women write about love, family and domestic issues. (And men write about only war and baseball? Come on.) Agents submit to those magazines more work by men. Women don’t have time to produce longer work, so thus the prevalence of women publishing in poetry. Men do better with rejection. Once slapped down by an editor, a man will pop another piece in the mail to him (usually a him) and say, “Go ahead. Hit me with your best shot.” Women, not so much. We’re perfectionists, too, which may make us actually better writers. (Thank you to the male respondent who made that conjecture.)

A scan of the last few issues of Silk Road Review, the literary magazine I edit, supports the assertion that smaller magazines do much better on gender equity. We have a female nonfiction editor at Silk Road, and two thirds of the nonfiction in our recent issues was written by women. So maybe women editors, as Katha Pollit says, make the difference. We have a senior male poetry editor and over 50 percent of the poetry we publish is written by women. Maybe it is true that in the world of poetry women enjoy equal footing? Fiction in our issues usually breaks about even in gender, and again we have a senior male editor. I don’t know how to interpret those particular numbers, although I will note fiction seems to generate the more difficult discussions regarding what we will accept. How gender might or might not figure into those assessments I don’t know. I’ll start paying more attention. We don’t publish book reviews, so we’re off the hook here. We also don’t pay, and the editor in chief is a woman (me)—one sensitive to these matters because she (me) is also a writer. Could it be that money (and all the top magazines pay) and male editors are the unfortunate formula more likely to shut out women?

Get a Grip

Here’s what I conclude, and long before the dust on this subject will settle: If you are a woman writer, it’s time to get a grip: Unless you have two lives to live—because it may take twice as long for you to get where a male writer does–then face facts and put the pedal to the metal, or at the least in your spine. (It is the Chinese year of the Rabbit or specifically the Metal Rabbit, so take it as a sign. The timid are going to get tough.)

I offer you these successful female writers who I have followed this last year and had the opportunity to see in action as they teach and/or explain their art. Each one has given me valuable advice:

Ann Hood.
Bonnie Jo Campbell.
Naseem Rhaka.
Laura Lippman.
Sarahlee Lawrence.
Minal Hajratwala.
Jennie Shortridge

What have I learned from these writers and other women writers I’ve been stalking and studying, aside from the fact that you must be committed to blazing your own trail?:

• Treat your writing like a business: Don’t romanticize it. Do it. Need help making your business work? Ask for it help. Need to learn better ways to do it? Reach out to other writers—women as often as men–and be willing to pay for their time.

• Don’t make it perfect. I dare you to send out your work before its time, especially if you are a fixer. Be careful, be thorough, rewrite, but draw a line after which the work must go out. It will be good enough. Remember editors make it perfect.

• Create a community. Help other women writers. Be an editor, a writing series director, a fund raiser, a loyal fan, a teacher.

• Get other women read. If you are a teacher, ask yourself how many women you require your students read. If your students reading list is not at least 50 percent female, why isn’t it? If you don’t help your students take women writers seriously then are you perpetuating the problem?

• Take a risk, woman up, send out your work and then expect to take it on the chin. Get used to it. Speak up in your own defense–or on the web–even if the sound of your own voice makes you queasy. Send out some wild and crazy stuff. Fly your freak flag. When you find an editor who will publish you, be smart and love that editor forever.

• Because it’s scary to know you might get punched when you send out work (and you will), offset the fear by adoring yourself, even to an annoying degree. Eileen Myles imagines when she gets up in front of a group of people to read or share her work that she’s loved—as if she’s reading to family. She thinks a great many of the male writers grew up assuming that their words were taken seriously by a family that loved them, and that has made all the difference. Try it. Imagine you are adored and brilliant and everyone in the room already knows it.

• Look close to home: If you have girls in your life—you are a parent, an aunt or uncle, a teacher—make those girls read their writing to you. Applaud it, tape it up for everyone to see. Help those girls to own their space in the writing world. After all, half of the kingdom of words is rightly theirs.