Why Do I Write & What Is My Process–by Emily Kennedy

I come from a family of writers, though none of them knew it. They hid their thoughts, so eloquently expressed in letters packed carelessly in cardboard boxes and stashed in a hot and dusty attic. I found these letters from the twenties, forties, fifties when I was settling my aunt’s estate. They were there with my own, the ones I sent her throughout my childhood. I was faithful if not completely in command of my words then. I can tell that I tried to sound literary, even when describing a trip to the movies or a problem with my sister.

The oldest letters inspired me to write my first novel, Waking Sleeping Dogs. I had always known I would write a book and had been searching for inspiration as I raised a family and invested my time in freelance work. I became a self-taught artist, using the compositions I had studied in my art history classes in college as my guides. I painted furniture and walls, expressing my love for color and form while honoring the Masters before me. (I even copied a Monet on the lid of a laundry basket. Yikes!) I told my husband that the words just wouldn’t come yet. He waited patiently for years and encouraged me to write something. Anything. He said he knew I was a writer. He had my letters to him in college to prove it.

Something was missing during those art years with a dog and children crawling around beneath the furniture I was trying to decorate, wet paint and paws driving me crazy. I needed order. I needed a career with no mess! I needed a computer!

I promised I would write that book if my husband bought me a new computer. That was around the late 90s after I found the letters. I was truthful if not dedicated. I had no idea how to compose a book, so I concentrated on bits and pieces of dialogue. The hard drive crashed. Twice. I lost everything both times, but for some reason I was not daunted. I knew I was not ready. The stuff I had written was merely practice for the real thing.

We moved to our farm in Tennessee, and I started to feel inspiration all around me. I began a rewarding career, still freelance, in photo styling. I found that I could see the compositions in photography as I saw them on furniture and walls. I styled for wonderful photographers, changing angles, clothing on models, chairs, lamps. My work was published, and I was inspired to enter a contest with Better Homes and Gardens. I won second place in the kitchen category and was featured in the September 2008 issue.

Getting ready for the BH&G shoot was more strenuous than I realized. Frantically shoveling mulch and landscaping the house so the magazine people would be pleased, I injured my back. It didn’t catch up with me for a while; I still flew to Chicago and Boston to show the products that I had helped to photograph. But something was wrong. The pain I could handle; the numbness that crept into my left foot was too troubling to ignore.

“Buy me a Mac laptop, and I’ll write that book as I recuperate,” I bargained with my husband as we faced the surgery on my spine that we knew was inevitable. Scared for me and hoping to help me stay productive, he agreed. This time I had no other options other than to write. Lying on my back in bed for a time, then propped on pillows as I slowly healed, the words flowed. As they poured into my head I wrote. I allowed myself to complete the ghost of a first chapter, knowing it didn’t open the doors to my book, knowing I would have to revisit it often. Giving myself that freedom allowed me to move forward. Never before could I take seriously anything without a polished beginning.

After about ten or so chapters, I realized I needed order. I stopped and started researching proper writing techniques online. I learned about outlines and suddenly remembered William Faulkner’s notes on the walls of his home in Oxford, Mississippi, where my husband and I had lived while he finished his last year of college. I forced myself to outline my novel as well as start a very detailed character study, assigning eye colors and other physical features to the jumbled group of people in my book. They were coming alive, and I was beginning to know them.

I finished the book in about a year. I did not do it alone, however. I had a Muse! My daughter, Claire, was crushed when she couldn’t find a job for the summer following my surgery. A light bulb flashed in my mind when she called with the news, unmasked disappointment and shame in her voice. This was the break I needed to finish! As an English major and another creative mind, she was the one I could use to bounce ideas.

Many days went like this:

Me: “I can’t figure out how to move the story along and get this character to the next phase.”

She: “Have you thought of this? Or this?”

I then would hang up the phone, write feverishly for hours, and email her with the result.

Claire and her two younger sisters, Catherine and Annelise, are also writers who started with letters. We delight in the fact that we are all each other’s Muses.

Sometimes I wonder if I went too far in reading those letters I found in the attic. They were personal, after all. But I come back around to not worrying too much about it. I know my family more because of their words. I know of my father’s love of Dickens and his carefully crafted arguments to encourage my mother to go to college. And I know my ancestors would be proud that they inspired me to write words that the world can see.