The Number One Most Important Trait a Writer Needs

Do you have what it takes?

As many of you may know, my husband and I recently moved across the country with an advance notice of approximately three months. We sold, gave away, recycled, or just plain threw out half of our stuff, put our house on the market, said goodbye to our friends, hoped that someday our families would be able to make the even longer trip to come visit us, crammed our dog and last two houseplants into the back of the car, and headed east.

Photo credit: Bernd Dittrich

After all that stress, we were exhausted, at least ten pounds lighter (nothing like a big move for a weight loss plan), relieved, and excited for the unknowns ahead that had pulled us out of our ruts and into a completely new life. (I know labelling emotions isn’t the best way to tell a story, but hey, this has been a big year for them). Our troubles weren’t over, though, with unforeseen health challenges and hospital stays over the next several months, all in the context of a challenging new job and no in-person support network.

Photo credit: Kenny Eliason

Sometimes I wonder how it is that we’re functioning at all by now. How am I even writing this post, for instance, when I feel as though the anxiety and sadness that we’ve endured has built to near bursting point behind our carefully-constructed stone walls? How am I getting up every day, pushing down food for which I often have no appetite, throwing on some clothes that only a few people will see, reading the political news that inexplicably has hardly anything to do with climate change, and searching for something, anything, positive to think about or look forward to?

How do I keep going?

How?

Thank goodness I have an answer. Better yet, it’s only one word.

Resilience.

Let me say that again, if only for my own benefit. Resilience. Grit. An ability to claw one’s way from the mud and try again, no matter how impossible things seem.

Like so many things in my life, my border collie is my best role model of what this means. Let’s not forget that Tock endured a big change in his life, too—the greatest in all his nine years. He had to give up his precious ponderosa pine cones, for which he seemed to have developed a special receptor in his brain sometime back in puppyhood. When we lived in Montana, he loved nothing more than to roll one down into the trail from where he waited, only to spring up and catch it from me, run ahead and do it all over again. For Tock, that was his definition of a walk, some very productive work, and a fabulous time, all in one.

Tock frozen by the side of the trail, waiting for me to find the cone that he has placed where I will trip on it if I don’t pick it up.

When we arrived at our new home, Tock picked up a small, egg-shaped cone from a pitch pine tree but immediately dropped it, like you might if you put what you thought was a refreshing mint on your tongue only to find out it was an aspirin. Not prickly enough! Tock was surely thinking. Too small! Totally wrong! He didn’t touch another one of those cones for weeks, and never even tried pick up one of the longer, softer white pine cones. But in the meantime, did he waste away in despair?

These two pitch pine cones are simply not worth Tock’s time.

He did not. Almost immediately, he switched to sticks. He might have been a little confused at first because he couldn’t roll them into the trail, but he learned in the space of one walk to bring them back to me and drop them at my feet (or sometimes plow into me with one or thrust it at my face to show me just what an amazing stick it was, but that’s another story). He also discovered an incredible quality of sticks: they float. Nothing seems to bring him greater happiness now than swimming for a stick in a pond, or even in the ocean. Frisbees, which he’ll fetch if there’s nothing else, still remain a distant second. He has fully, proudly made the switch from a western mountain dog to an eastern swamp/ocean dog. And if he still has dreams about ponderosa cones, he wakes from them not with sadness but with enthusiasm for a new day—and a new stick.

In Tock’s opinion, a big stick is always best.

Do I have resilience, too? Sometimes I feel quite the opposite. When I have fleeting thoughts of the lovely mountains that I miss so much, I immediately send them back behind my wall. I build it higher stone by stone, keeping the longing at bay. This sure seems like denial rather than toughness. But … then I take Tock for a walk by the ocean. The calm lap of blue-green water, the warm sand, the wave-smoothed stones soothe my soul and help me accept this trade of one sort of beauty for another.

Back to writing—and an example that many of you may relate to: when I get yet another form rejection from a literary agent for my gazillionth manuscript, what do I do? Truthfully, I hurl it behind my wall—because if I dwell on it, my heart might as well be ripped out, my dreams destroyed. This is definitely not resilient behavior. But … after a day or a week or a month, I’ll open up that manuscript, fix it, try again. If I’ve queried it enough, I’ll put it aside and start writing something new. Because in the end, I know that continuing with my work is the best recipe. Not for success, necessarily, but for feeling a heck of a lot better than I did before. And because the world of publishing is so very difficult these days, I firmly believe that resilience is the most important trait we writers can possess.

So thank you, my furry friend, for inspiring me to jot down these few words. Simply the act of writing them makes me feel like I’ve climbed atop the stone wall of despair, unafraid of the monsters lurking behind it. And if I tip my head far, far back, I can see the sky.

Happy Tales!