Saturday Sayings: Launching Pains

I've written 84 Saturday Sayings and luckily most have felt inspired.  It's been a long week though and inspired does not quite fit the way my mind and body feel right now.  (Anyone with me on this?)  So searching my book of quotes for today's post proved to be a ho-hum undertaking until my eyes landed on this one by Lucy Calkins.  It's such a perfect thought for this moment that I think she probably meant to say, "Tammy, when you launch a writing worship, the one thing you know for certain is that there will be problems..."  Maybe she didn't want to exclude anyone so she chose pronouns like "we" and "us."  I'm pretty sure she was talking directly at me though.

Training up writers in the way they should go is almost painful.  I won't miss a day, but there are times when I have to talk myself into another writing workshop.  (I think I can.  I think I can.  I think I can.)  The persistence pays off in the end and the writing they produce is one of the most rewarding parts of my job, but the launching is so much work, especially when my writers aren't necessarily familiar with the writing workshop practice of writing every day, writing about their lives, stretching moments across several pages, independently working for a sustained amount of time, using pens, and the list goes on.  They're wired for this though.  I am too.  Even amidst the pain of problems, they were born to be writers and I was born to teach them.