This piece blew us all away in class.
It's very tricky to lean into a full-on metaphorical image like this. Though Tod said it happened without his thinking about it, and without planning, his practice has allowed him to stay very close to surprising connections. He says he didn't even realize it was him until teh part about "the other members of his writing group."
The imposter syndrome - feeling a fraud is well-depicted here. Also, the more nuanced but super tricky feeling that anything we do well must be cheating, not worth reading. If the writing comes easily, if, for instance, we build fictional worlds easily with barely any effort, then that must be bad writing, or we are just tricking everyone into thinking we are a good writer.
How to overcome this? Practice. Regular and compassionate. Consistent. And companionship.
Tod's writing:
He sprung into the white open expanse of his blank notebook page
as if he was diving into a swimming pool of milk. When he surfaced, breathless, blinking away the liquid
pearls from his eyelashes, he was astonished to find that he’d written an
entire story.
The
story was about a man who wrote stories, but hadn’t always been able to do so
because the stories got stuck on their way out, they spoke in languages the man
didn’t understand, so he didn’t know how to write them down, how to spell them. It was a matter that came before the
actual craft of writing itself, because he had to learn the language the
stories were speaking.
