Writing Against the Odds, Part 3

The third speaker was Leslie Leyland Fields, who lives and writes in Alaska. Her latest book is called Surprise Child: Finding Hope in Unexpected Pregnancy.

Leyland Fields first spoke about the obstacle of work. She works with her family as a commercial fisher. So, she asks, how can she write when work claims so much of her? She spoke of having to be "here" with her work while she longed to be "over there" with her writing. But she found that when she lived to write, she was wasting her life. She needed to live to live, and then write to more fully live, not to escape and record her life.

"Either life is holy with meaning or it doesn't mean a damn thing." (I think that's a Frederick Buechner quotation.)

Her second obstacle to writing was love. It takes a lot of time to love a husband, and six children, and a mother-in-law with Alzheimers. Love empties us into needs that are never filled or silenced. The quiet writing life she dreamed of was gone, dead. Instead she had a noisy, riotous writing life, more desperate, bloodier, with no time to pretend.

But how can love be an obstacle to writing, she then asked? What will you write if your passions are not lived in you first? Leyland Fields realized she needed to write "here," in her life, where she was standing, not from an empty life. Yes, you'll be tired, you'll write while others watch a movie, you'll write in planes and hotels, you'll forget how to relax. But write from within the life you've been given, if you dare.

What a great challenge.