Now, Williams wasn’t up there reading a list. She sprinkled her wisdom amongst well-crafted anecdotes that made me laugh and made tears roll down my cheeks. She is, after all, a gifted story teller.
But as I sat among hundreds of fellow writers, we who agonize in immeasurable time for the one perfect word to don the page– in a place where I’ve witnessed jealousy over another’s success has spawned takedowns and shunning– Williams said “There’s no room for competition.”
No room for competition.
Hmm. Because it seems like there so frequently is. Yet her follow-up says it all.
“Nobody else has your voice.”
Of course. We are all unique. There are enough stories and ways to tell it to go around.
If this were not true, would not the human race have run out of stories to tell by now? But no. Like music we never seem to run out of combinations for notes and sounds, and so to it is with the story of our humanity.
And, as Williams pointed out in her final statement on this subject “We do not have to shoulder this burden alone.” We do not have to be alone in our struggle for the words to convey our ideas. We do not have to be alone in our struggle to justify our art as more than a hobby. We do not have to be alone in seeing the world in the painfully detailed and emotionally real way that a writer does. We do not have to be alone in understanding that everything around us functions in paradox.
We write alone, she said (to paraphrase), but in doing so we create community. We draw others into our shared experience, and, thus, create a community of writers.