So . . . my therapist told me I was “dating around” on my books. Yes, I have four novels-in-process I’ve been juggling, and my writing group agrees: it is time to settle down. Make a commitment. Go deep.

My writing group members have been celebrating phenomenal successes in the world of writing, successes that suggest that the doomsayers are wrong. So finishing a book seems like a good idea right about now.

Of course, I took a look at my four books–my writing group around me in a circle–and I picked the biggest, unruliest, excitingest one of the quartet.

Should I be scared?

I guide other people through this process all the time. It’s easier to see clearly what someone else’s manuscript needs–and how wonderful it is. It’s easier to encourage someone else to be brave, to set and keep goals, to . . . well, to . . . commit. It’s kind of silly, but I’ve often wished that writer-me could have editor-me as a coach and confidant. Instead–and better–I am turning to you–all the wonderful writers and readers out there, electronically connected to me and to each other.

What works best for you? I’m looking for advice, encouragement and your own commitment to your own courageous goals. Help me to be brave, single-minded and stubborn this year, won’t you?

What are your own writing plans for 2010, and what’s your best take on how to get to where you are determined to go?

I took my sons to the Little Farm in Berkeley’s Tilden Park this afternoon. We’ve been taking them to a lot of memorials without knowing what, if anything, to say to them. They are, after all, only 25-months and 21-months, just getting the hang of having been born. How would we explain death to them? So we just pull our their khakis and button-down shirts and let them play in the side yards of the memorials.

On our way out of the the Little Farm, we crossed a wooden slated bridge, and through the railings, we saw a turtle floating in the water, its head straining up the the surface while the rest of it relaxed in the murk of the pond. We often walk a ways down along Jewel Lake in search of turtles; last time we had seen not a one, so we were excited by this guy floating there. We watched him and talked about him for a while until suddenly he tucked his head, flipped over and dove down far under the surface. Gone.

“More turtle,” said Leo.

“More turtle,” Charlie echoed.

Angie and I are getting used to these kinds of demands–more fire engine, more excavator–which is to say, demands which we cannot willfully meet. And it occurred to me that my boys are inevitably learning about impermanence, about the lack of control we all face repeatedly, whether we accept it or not.

I am not much more evolved than they are when it comes to what I want. More Aunt Lesley, for example. What do you mean, she is gone and there is nothing you can do about it? That makes no sense. There is so much you have control over. How can you not have control over this simple desire of mine?

So tucked at the bottom of this little koan is a writer’s confession. I have begun a new draft today. I have written 1000 words plus a few more to top it off. I have made plans and promises to myself; I have set goals. Now I am going public. It’s a risk, but since part of my life’s work is writing and part of my life’s work is helping other people to write, it seemed “in integrity” to admit this to you.

There is undoubtedly a link here–something about what we cannot control. Sure, I can only say, This is what I want. This day has been given to me and this is what I will do, this is what I have done. But that effort of will seems qualitatively different than fighting the gods. Most of the time it seems different enough to be worth the sweat. We do what we can.

Care to tell me what commitments you have made–and kept–today? I’d love to hear.

The title of this post is a quote from a conversation with a wonderful coach named Sharon Sayler (check out her radio show), and I think it’s the perfect description of what writing demands of us.

Someone was saying to me this week that it’s not the writing she minds, but the voice in her head that accompanies the writing. The voice that says, “This is not good enough; this is terrible.” That’s what makes writing hard.

I see my kids creating so joyfully. Charlie loves typing at the computer. He’s 18 months old! And we don’t let him watch any television (except inauguration), but we’ve not been able to shield him from our own obsessions with the computer, and he’s hooked. Leo loves to draw. “More drawing,” he says if he has to leave the blank page to, say, eat. And when one page fills, he says, “New page.” With delight.

That voice that critiques the writing as we go is the sum of all that is wrong with the world. It’s a voice that lacks empathy, artistry, depth (other than the depths of despair), compassion, curiosity (what might come of following this line, this trail of words?).

If we heard this voice directed at anyone else–on the political stage or at a restaurant or on television–we would know that we’d sworn enmity to this voice and all it believes in. But in the privacy of our own offices or journals, that voice becomes an ambassador from the land of common sense. It’s Carl Kasell, and you can win him recorded on your answering machine.

The most important thing to remember about the voice that tells you anything at all about the wet new writing you’ve just laid upon the fibers of your page is that that voice is wrong. Plain wrong. That voice doesn’t know. It’s the loudest kid on the bus arguing about whether or not there is a Santa Claus or who is the best softball player. But it doesn’t know the truth; it doesn’t even know how to pause softly and fumble for the truth. It’s a bully. Don’t let yourself be bullied.

You won’t know the worth of the writing until later. Much later. After the draft is finished and some time has been spent recovering yourself and engaging with other things, you will curl up with it and get to know it, this thing that you’ve created. You will have the distance from it so that you can treat it as a friend, not someone you snap at to take the garbage out, not all the shame from the worst moments of your childhood heaped upon the thin thread of your attempted sentence. It will be something else: its own being, separate from you, alive and flawed and wonderful and fixable.

You, at your kitchen table, at your neighborhood cafe, under a blanket on your couch, waiting in the car for your kid to come out of gymnastics. You are working miracles. You are leaping from the trapeze without seeing the net. You are soaring, caught in the currents of air, in the uncertainty that gifts us with new possibilities we could not have imagined otherwise.

Treasure that act. Trust it. Silence the voice. Laugh at it. Shrink it down to size. Write down what it says and put those words in the mouth of your villain. Copy out the opposite of the voice’s evil message and post those words around your house and in your notebooks (computerized or not).

I, and hundreds of thousands like me, are waiting on the other side of a page for that miracle you grind out with so much labor and hesitancy and recklessness and terror and joy. I know a world of people who are not supposed to exist–freaks and queers and manly girls and girly men and all manner of others who are not, anywhere, described or anticipated. If someone is trying to add “readers” to that list, I defy them. We are everywhere, waiting, for the next story that will change our lives.

[Thursday, Feb. 26, I am offering a FREE TELE-CLASS on dialog. Dazzling fun that will grow your writing in ways you won't believe. Email me for information about how to join us.]