Time and Madeleine L'Engle
I have lost and found myself many times in in the wonderful worlds created by Madeleine L'Engle. Her literary biography confirms things I know to be profoundly important in a writing life: to survive rejection, to be ready for inspiration and opportunity o come in unexpected ways and to journal, journal, journal. She failed to find her audience as a writer, while her family struggled with its finances, and so decided to stop writing on her 40th birthday, in 1958.
However, she had kept a journal since she was eight, and the habit was impossible to erase. She went on a long camping trip and conceived, on the road, the idea for A Winkle in Time. She shopped it around to publishers and was rejected more than thirty times before this extraordinary sci fantasy novel was acquired by Farrar, Straus and Giroux; it was published in 1962.
We see how in her story the obstacle may prove to be the way, in two senses: it can prompt you to try a different way, and then to develop the grit and persistence to win through when you are on the right path. Through it all, you must journal, journal, journal. I don't how anyone can become a writer - or lead an examined life - without keeping a journal.
Digital art by RM
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