How I Wrote 30 Books After Heart Surgery At Age 72

I Stopped Worrying About The Wrong Things

I wrote a lot of books in a short period of time, starting when I all I wanted to do was have somebody wrap my tender, traumatized body in bubble wrap and leave me alone.

So maybe you know where I’m going with this. Actually, it could go in a lot of different directions. Like, why aren’t you as productive as I am? But I’d never say that. Every writer’s process is different, and quality counts more than productivity. Or, I’m saying it’s easy to come back from open-heart surgery. Hell to the no, it isn’t!

I’m on a little bit of a high horse because many writers on Medium document their struggles and fears about writing.

Their doubts, their reluctance to put their work out there, and their pain of rejection. Some writers achieve some success and recognition and yet their psyches turn on them with something called Imposter Syndrome. It slows down their output. I know what they mean. In my day we just called ourselves frauds, hiding behind a mask, afraid we’d be discovered as the shit writers we believed we were.

Some writers spend as much time agonizing over whether they are entitled to call themselves writers as others do agonizing over the words on their pages. Or, they question whether they even have the right to write at all.

And as I read these articles, or articles offering solutions to these problems, I realize I have something to say about all this. On a day when I’m impatient and bitchy, I could sum up my attitude by saying, oh, for crying out loud, get over yourself.

That would actually be good advice. It’s what I did. It helped me write a gazillion books as an old lady after having a miserable surgery and starting the first book five weeks out of the hospital when I could barely sit up in a chair I was in so much discomfort and had no taste buds left so I couldn’t eat and I hurt and blah blah blah.

But that would sound heartless. You’d think I was some kind of dragon lady who didn’t understand the struggles of the creative spirit. You’d stop reading and say I was one of those tough old birds who complained about the younger generation and forgot what the struggle was like, and I wasn’t worth listening to.

And how wrong you would be.

Most other days I’d still say, get over yourself. But I’d be gentle and full of understanding for how hard it is to overcome the voices in your head that want to pull you away from the thing you love most and convince you that you have no talent, and no one cares about your stories and blah blah blah.

Oh, yes. I know all about those fears and anxieties. I also understand the futility of them. I know they don’t serve you. They don’t help you to write. They don’t teach you craft or inspire your stories or ideas. I know they only do one blasted thing. They waste your precious time.

How do I know? Because back in the day, I had these very same worries. And they never did me a damn bit of good. And now I’m 80 years old. My time is running out. And when I think of all the time I wasted worrying about things that did me no good, I get angry. Angry with myself for believing the voices in my head.

And when I see you writing about these very same things, I get angry. Not angry with you personally. I get angry with the voices in your head.

And maybe a little bit angry with you personally for listening to them. Because you’re wasting your time. And one day, if you’re lucky, you’ll be as old as I am. And you’ll be angry too. You’ll say, why did I waste my time worrying about things that didn’t serve me? That didn’t help me get better, stronger, more sure of myself?

I don’t have many credentials. No MFA, no New York Times Sunday review of any of my books, though how I would love one. I’ve spent a fortune on classes with very good teachers and I’ve read only the best writers. Publishers Weekly did give one of my cookbooks a starred review, and I cherish that. I’m a critical success but not a financial one.

But what I know in my bones, in every cell of my body, I learned on my own.

Because I know my writing process. I’ve attended to it since I began writing as a fluke in 1973. I can teach you about craft, if that’s what you need. But craft won’t do you any good if you don’t write, day after day. If you don’t publish what you write as often as your schedule permits. If you don’t learn how to jump over the pain of rejection and doubt and soldier on to the next page, the project, sometimes just the next word. And I can help you with that. I can help you do that in the blink of an eye.

Because that’s all the time it took me. Twenty-five years and the blink of an eye.

I’ve been writing for almost half a century, but if I had to document how many actual years I spent writing, I’d be sorely embarrassed. Because for so much of that time in the early days, I suffered the same bouts of insecurity and self-sabotage that people write about here on Medium. Worrying about whether I had anything to say, or if my stories were well written, or if I had any talent. Was I just fooling myself? I struggled in therapy, in writing groups. In private, harrowing sessions of self-flagellation.

In other words, I led the day-to-day life of a beginning writer. And an intermediate writer. This torture continued after my first book was published, and I had a contract for a second. When that publisher threw that contract back in my face, well. Put yourself in my shoes. No, don’t. You’ve probably got enough troubles of your own.

And always I thought some day I’d overcome these horrible feelings. I’d have some breakthrough in confidence that I was sure all other successful writers had, and I would sit down to write in full possession of my powers, confident and sure of myself.

Until the day I realized that was a fiction. Until I finally understood these fears will never go away. If I had to wait until I was confident enough to believe I was a real writer, that I could sit and write without any doubt or second-guessing myself, my fingers would atrophy from lack of ues. I’d wait forever poised over my computer for some miracle to lift the burden of doubt from my shoulders.

Instead, what happened was, one day the voices plagued me as usual. You’re writing is garbage. No one cares about this story. You’re wasting your time. If you were really a writer you’d know what happens next. And on and on.

But instead of turning away from the page in defeat, I said in effect, thank you for sharing, but I have work to do.

I kept on writing, ignoring the negativity in my head as if it were the neighbor’s annoying radio. I couldn’t turn it off, so I just wrote in spite of it. It was odd at first not to argue with myself. To either try and bolster my confidence, or agree with the negative judgments.

But I didn’t do any of those things. I just focused on the sentence, the one after that, and then the next. It was a bit of a struggle at first, like holding your balance on a rocking boat. But by the end of my session, I realized the voices had stopped. My determination to keep working had simply overridden them after a while.

Of course they came back. That’s their job it seems. But now I had a tool. Since that day almost twenty-five years ago, I’ve never given in to a bout of despair over my ability to write, my right to write. I finish the work I assign myself for that day, unless I allow myself to get seduced by the internet or my mind to wander, which are other problems, but far easier to combat. In time, my resistance to cave into this negativity within myself, helped me actually to feel more confident in my abilities.

So, that’s how I did it. In an instant, really. But if it took me half my writing life to come to the realization I could just push on through doubt, why am I so hard on you? Why do I insist the rest of the writing world must jump over their doubt immediately. It’s because of this sticky thing called time.

There’s so little of it and it goes by so fast. I don’t want anyone else to end up like me, at age 80 with plenty of juice in the brain, a ton of ideas and stories to write, but a waning shelf life. I won’t live long enough to write all my stories. And when I think of the years I wasted worrying about whether I was good enough, worthy enough, I get angry.

Because I worried about all the wrong things.

Had I known how fast my life would go by, had I understood the pain of counting up time lost in self doubt that I’ll never get back, I would have become a badass about allowing myself to do the thing that I love much sooner. Because then I could have been doing it for so much longer.

So if you want to know how I wrote all those books feeling as awful as I did, it’s because I stopped worrying about the wrong things. I stopped waiting for someone to give me permission to write, or tell me my books were good or people cared about them. I was used to using the little bit of time in the day I felt strong enough to write.

I get plenty of bad reviews. But I don’t care. Writing is my life. Let those people go do their thing. They don’t have to read my stuff. I no longer have much time left to worry about what someone else thinks of my writing, or what even the voices in my head think of it.

Life comes at you fast. And it passes you by even faster.

Even if you’re young enough to be my great grandchild. You may not believe this, but you don’t have much time left either. Eighty years? It’ll be gone before you know it.

So whether you need me to say it in my badass grumpy voice, or my sweet grandma’s voice, the message is the same. You have my permission if you need it. Just get over yourself and write.