Aimee Stahlberg

Whenever something really big happens in my life, writing something new feels scary, unappealing, and disastrous. I shouldn’t do it. I can’t do it. I can rewrite, but if something too big is going to happen to the story, it feels dirty.

This month has felt packed with big things in my life: my first year wedding anniversary, my first nephew’s birth. It hasn’t seemed realistic to sit down and write those missing pieces of the puzzle that is my novel-in-stories.

And every time I think about not writing, a conversation that I had with my Grandma in Arizona on Cinco de Mayo pops into my head, one where she kept telling me I should write a novel. She said, “Every time you tell me something I feel like I’m there, like I can really see it.” She told me that I’m the only person that she knows who can really paint the picture for her using only my words, that she knows exactly what the gesture looks like, and all the while she can picture what I’m doing on the other end of the phone. We spoke for maybe an hour, and I was more energized to write than I had been in a long while, however, the pictures in my head weren’t anything. Sure, I journaled.

But, how long can I journal and keep calling this writing?