TILTING AT WINDMILLS

I love old movies, English mysteries, and Sherlock Holmes movies. George C. Scott once played a character who believed he was Sherlock Holmes. He dressed the part, talked the same, had a pipe clenched in his teeth most of the time, and called a friend "Watson." His family couldn't handle this obsession and wanted him to be declared insane and committed. Mainly, they want control of his fortune.

Joanne Woodward plays the part of a doctor who is supposed to prove his is insane--or cure him. In the process of her treatment, she falls in love with her "patient." Once in the movie, she asks him if many people call him Holmes? When he admits that scarcely anyone calls him by that name, the doctor asks if that makes him feel all alone.

"It does." "Holmes" admits, but goes on to say, "Still, it doesn't make me wrong."

Don't let anyone destroy your dreams of writing. Believe in yourself. Admit that it might be scary to send your work out for the possibility of rejection, but that you can do it. . . until acceptance. No one knows what you really have in your heart or vision.

Tilt those windmills all you want.

BEFORE THEY WERE FAMOUS

Isn't it ironic what we writers will do to make a living? Not that I'm an overwhelming success but I've done all sorts of jobs. I've filed credit receipts for an oil company, sold telephone equipment, typed tax returns (before computers!), managed an office, been a foreign-customer coordinator for an aerospace company, packaged sports cards and collections to be sold on QVC, and taught creative writing classes, just to mention a few. And I continued to write while doing so, as more famous writers have done.

William Faulkner must have been an odd Southern postmaster. I wonder if he wrote while sorting? Did he read the mail, or merely observe the people who came into his post office for character sketches, ideas?

Zane Grey was a dentist. Alex Haley wrote while in the Coast Guard about his own "roots." Bricklayers do beautiful work but there were none of his profession in John Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath"--only toiling Oakies.

How could a management professor write such stirring tales of past-prime people and forbidden love in "The Bridges of Madison County" and "Border Music?" Robert James Waller certainly knows how to manage his own writing.

I have met some wonderful writers in classes I have taken, and students in my own classes. Former military writing great masculine tales based on what they experienced in their war; a bookstore owner who created characters any reader would have sworn were right out of a history book; a young teacher who wrote (and had published) seven romances in one year in order to be able to write for a living; and the woman who had been confined to a wheelchair since an automobile accident twenty years ago, a writer who put herself into the characters minds in order to walk again, as she put it. They are all writers, no matter what professions or disabilities they might have, and they all have stories to tell, or important experiences to pass on.

We writers are secretaries, stockbrokers, laundry workers, doctors, civil servants, policmen, even retirees. We are of all professions, all backgrounds, all sort of people. None of this really matters, certainly not to our editors/publishers or readers--they only want us to write well enough to engage minds in our work, to sweep readers off their feet, to sell those books or magazines.