My Raging Doubt

Sometimes, just for fun, I torture myself with existential questions like this: which personal fact contributes most to my raging self-doubt, being a writer or being a recovering Midwesterner? (I can’t even throw being a mother into the mix or my head will explode.)

But here is another possibility: my penchant for over-analyzing and occasionally mistrusting my own abilities might also stem from being an English teacher for the last twenty-three years.

Why? Because teachers are constantly reflecting. It’s how we survive. Veteran teachers feed on daily reflection like Midwesterners feed on guilt. It starts with perfectly sane reflections like: How are they STILL not putting their names on things? or Will they ever love a really good extended metaphor as much as I do? But eventually, that retrospection that started as Yes, I inspired a kid to love writing today! evolves into Oh, my God, if I saved one student, just think of how many more I could’ve saved!

It’s an exhausting madness that can only be lessened by copious amounts of cheesecake and contemplative trips to Target.

So when someone asks me what it’s like to be a teacher who is also a writer, I tell them the two professions often swirl together so seamlessly, they end up looking an awful lot like literary bedfellows. Case in point, take a typical day in the life of a teacher/writer. First, I get up at 4:00 A.M. to write because, apparently, my window for creativity lies in the wee morning hours somewhere between Alas-I-am-properly-caffeinated and The-world-has-not-yet-ruined-me. As I sip coffee and life into my body, I add to my current Novel In Progress, sure that it is both brilliant and awful.

I then check in with Book Twitter to be inspired by those I call the Fancy Writers–the ones who get on End-of-Year lists, write bestsellers, and somehow manage to look impossibly cool in their author photos. As I prepare for the day, I whisper mantra #1. Work hard. Be nice. There is no mantra #2 because that’s just weird, so instead, for just a moment, I let myself imagine my own literary dreams.

They are beautiful and grand and I hope I deserve them. Then, right before Imposter Syndrome sneaks its way into my psyche, right before I ponder how being a writer makes me both immeasurably happy and shockingly miserable, I drive to school where I will try to convince one-hundred-and-twenty-two teenagers to be writers.

“Hustle and grit, guys,” I tell my students, “Dream about what you want, but never give up on what you need.”

“I need to go to the bathroom” a girl says.

Fair enough.

I tell them to write about what’s in their hearts when I assign the Personal Narrative, and although a few write about moments of triumph or embarrassment, most write about their personal tragedies because they need to. Long, sad car rides to the veterinarian, from where their pets won’t return home. Bad news arriving as phone calls that make their little stomachs clinch. Trips to hospital rooms that no child should have to take.

They try to belittle their writing in the usual ways. “This isn’t very good” followed by “I know I didn’t do it right”, but I don’t let them. I don’t let them say the things I let myself sometimes feel about my own work. I don’t let them feel less than. I tell them not to worry about being a Fancy Writer and just focus on what they did right.

“Look at how many great things you did in this story,” I remind them, “You’ve done everything I’ve asked you to do.” 

Sensory details and figurative language: check.

Dialogue that moves the story forward: check. 

Tension on every page: check.

Zoom-in moment: check.

Full circle ending: check. 

I then admit to them that I–someone who has published four books–sometimes forgets all of these rules. I tell them that no matter what, even when the story isn’t working, it still has a soul. I tell them that it’s the writer’s job to find that soul.

And then I think about how utterly full of crap I am.

The reality is that sometimes you can’t find a story’s soul. Sometimes, you can’t even find a pulse, and you find yourself staring at a lifeless pile of words that you wished you could erase. Yes, you think, you probably should erase ALL the words. (And you should probably stop using the second-person “you” because unless you’re Lorrie Moore–and trust me, readers, I am only Lorrie Moore in my dreams–you should just stick to first-person.)

And still.

Despite it all, my students and I keep writing. I run my creative writing club. I help them move beyond the essay and dip their nervous little toes into fictional waters. I mentor the poor saps who are already writers and just don’t know it yet, and in their presence I omit all of the horrors of what it means to truly be a writer–the mean reviews, the pride-swallowing requests for blurbs, the lonely, quiet solitude of knowing that your best work might be the sad, occasional eulogy that your siblings ask you to write because you are the only writer in the family. I certainly don’t tell them that on most days, a writer is one paragraph away from being called out as a total fraud.

And still.

Writers write, I profess to any young mind that will hear me, and when I watch them muster up the courage it takes to put pen to paper, I wonder if it is, in fact, me doing the inspiring or vice versa. 

Yesterday, right on cue like he always does every single day, one of the boys in my fourth period class weaved through a throng of kids to make sure he got to say, “Have a great day, Mrs. Leiknes.”  I was just about to tell him how much I appreciated his little act of kindness, how I looked forward to it every single day, when he added, “You may not feel like a Fancy Writer all the time, but you’re fancy to us.”

Faith in humanity restored: check.

—

Elizabeth Leiknes grew up in rural Iowa and can make thirty-seven dishes featuring corn. She graduated from the University of Iowa before receiving her master’s in writing from the University of Nevada, Reno. Her novels have received Starred Reviews from Kirkus and Booklist. Her most recent novel, The Lost Queen of Crocker County, was published in 2018.

Currently, Elizabeth teaches English by day and writes novels in the wee hours of the morning. Her best writing is usually done on the backs of napkins and Target receipts. She lives with her husband and two children near Lake Tahoe, Nevada.

https://www.elizabethleiknes.com/

Follow her on Twitter https://twitter.com/eleiknes

THE LOST QUEEN OF CROCKER COUNTY

For fans of books like THE READERS OF BROKEN WHEEL RECOMMEND, a feel-good story of going home again to get things right.

Crocker County crowns a new Corn Queen every year, but Jane Willow’s the one you would remember. She can’t forget Iowa, either. Even though she fled to LA to become a film critic years ago, home was always there behind her.

But when a family tragedy happens, she’s forced to drive back to Crocker County. The rolling farmlands can’t much hide the things she left behind: the best friend she abandoned who now runs a meatloaf hotline, the childhood front porch that sits hauntingly empty, and that fiasco of a Corn Fest that spun her life in a different direction.

Before Jane can escape her past a second time, disaster strikes, and she will have to find a way to right her mistakes and save herself from her regrets. An unflinchingly love letter to the Midwest that unfolds through a celebration of movies, this ferociously endearing novel brings home the saving grace of second chances.

 

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, How To and Tips