My adventure as a writer has been at turns heartbreaking, terrifying, fulfilling, mind-blowing and life-affirming.  If there is one thing that has characterized both my life and my career, it is summarized in what I have been told was one of Roots author Alex Haley’s favorite sayings–“Throw your hat over the fence, and climb over to get it.”  Now, what does that mean, exactly?  Throwing your hat over the fence?  To me, it means a DECLARATION.  I am going to take myself somewhere I have never been–and I’m going to commence this journey with no idea of where the road will lead.  But my hat is already there, and I’ll know it when I see it.  

 

When we set out in life to be writers, we do not face a short white-picket fence with an open gate in our paths, ladies and gentlemen.  If it were that easy, everyone would do it.  No, this fence is electrified.  Topped with razor wire.  And–sorry, but I write horror novels–this fence is littered with the bones of other writers who never made it over. 

 

Many of you have friends who wanted to be writers.  Many of you have family members who wanted to be writers.  One of my most crushing moments as a newspaper intern was when a veteran business reporter heard me chattering about my dream of being a novelist and said, “Oh yeah–I used to want to be a writer.”  WHY is it so difficult to get over that fence? 

 

I have wanted to be a writer since as long as I can remember.  I wrote my first book when I was four–Baby Bobby.  It was self-published, of course.  I took several pages of typing paper, folded them in half, and drew stick figures and captions.  Baby Bobby is in his crib.   Baby Bobby is drinking from his bottle.  Captivating stuff–or it was to my mother, at least.  She made copies of the book at our church and gave it to all of her friends.  When I look at Baby Bobby now, the thing that strikes me about it most is the flap copy on the back page.  Yes, there was flap copy–with a plot synopsis and an author bio:  Baby Bobby is a book about a baby.  The author is Tananarive Due.

 
          Yes, I spelled “Author” wrong.  I even spelled “Baby” wrong.  But already, at the age of four, I had thrown my hat over the fence.  I had declared myself to be an author.  I cannot remember a single major decision in my life that has not been influenced by that early declaration.

      My first blessing was a supportive family.  Granted, not everyone has that.  My parents encouraged my writing dream at every step.  My parents were also former civil rights activists–in 1960, my mother, Patricia Stephens Due, spent 49 days in jail for ordering food at a Woolworth lunch counter in Tallahassee, Florida, as part of the nation’s first “Jail-in”–so from very early on, my two sisters and I were encouraged to expect obstacles, but to understand that we had opportunities like no other generation of African-Americans in this nation.  While we knew we would never go to jail for ordering a hamburger at a public lunch counter, we were told to expect to work twice as hard to get half as far.  Rather than feeling discouraged, my sisters and I felt the hopes and dreams of the slaves as the wind that powered our sails.  My parents, after all, had helped change the face of the world by not backing down and singing [SING] “We Shall Overcome,” without a single act of violence, even as violence was committed against them.  Nothing was impossible.    

       My next blessing was the support and sound advice of teachers.  In fifth grade, Mrs. Abramowicz read my stories about Cris Manning, Wonder-Boy aloud to the class.  In the tenth grade, my English teacher, Mr. Kaplan, read a 200-page hand-written manuscript because I asked him to tell me what he thought.  In eleventh grade, my English teacher, Mrs. Estaver, was rumored to be a writer herself.  When I told her my life’s dream, she gave me a piece of advice I have carried in my bloodstream ever since: “In order to be a writer,” she said, “you have to wallpaper your wall with rejection slips.”

 

I’m grateful to Mrs. Estaver to this day for that advice because I believe it’s the single most important lesson a writer should know.  Mrs. Estaver didn’t say I should expect one or two rejection slips–she said I would have to wallpaper my wall with rejection slips.  That picture in my 16-year-old consciousness didn’t magically make my skin any thicker or my ego less fragile–but it gave me a tangible visualization of how difficult the road ahead would be.  I just nodded and thought “OK, then,” the way I would have felt if someone had said that in order to get across that river, I would have to swim all day and all night.  I knew I would have a lot of work ahead.   

 

I couldn’t wait to start collecting my rejection slips.  My first one came in high school, from a magazine then called Young Miss.  Taking Mrs. Estaver’s advice to heart, I taped the rejection slip to my wall.  Each day, when I looked at it, instead of being filled with disappointment, the sight of that rejection slip made me feel that I was, at last, on my way.  I have collected rejection slips from some of this nation’s finest publications.  Through college and beyond, all of my rejection slips were taped to the back of my door, in rows.  Chronological, not alphabetical.  Each one was a step on my Yellow Brick Road.  In the years between high school and my first publication when I was 28, I’m not saying that there weren’t times I despaired.  I’m not saying there weren’t times I doubted.  But Mrs. Estaver took the sting out of my rejection slips for a very long time.

 

 

It is so difficult to declare to the world, “I am a writer.”  So difficult even to throw your hat over that fence in the first place, never mind climbing after it.   So, that’s the first step: As a freshman in college, the revelation in Janet Desaulnier’s fiction-writing workshop was that I wasn’t LEARNING how to be a writer.  According to Janet, I already WAS a writer.  And that is a lesson I’ll pass on to all of you now, who are so accustomed to saying, “I WANT to be a writer.”  You are already writers.  Many of you have been writers most of your lives.  But if not–if you didn’t start writing when you were four, or fourteen–that’s fine, too.  I knew a writer in Miami named Robert Antoni who’d been a physician his entire adult life, was knocked out in a boating accident, and woke up a writer.  And a genius writer at that. (I can just hear the conversation: “How did you start writing?” “It was an injury.”)  Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, one of the world’s finest, did not begin writing until she was forty. 

 

All of us are writers.  Some of us are published, some of us are unpublished.  Some of us love to write, and some of us were dragged into it kicking or screaming.  But whatever it is–for good or for ill–we are all writers. The only writers I actively discourage are the ones who think they can get rich writing.  That one still boggles my mind.  In my agent’s office in New York, he has a framed letter from a celebrated turn-of-the century poet named Paul Laurence Dunbar, who wrote to his agent there a hundred years ago.  The letter basically said, “Still broke, and Christmas is coming.” Nothing has changed.   No one gets rich writing–unless they do.  This is the only rule you need to remember about wealth and the writer: The two words do not belong in the same sentence.  Unless they do.  

 

I hope that question has been cleared up.   

 

For most writers, fantasies of riches aside, our dream is publication.  We dare to hope that someone outside of our household walls would care what we have to say. It’s a delicious hubris.  And it’s petrifying. Which brings me back to the tyranny and tragedy of rejection.  This single factor alone is responsible for most writers who fail. 

 

 

This is not to say that it’s not okay to change your mind.  It’s OK to give up on a dream if you truly have let the dream go.  When people come up to me and say, “How can I motivate myself to write?,” I want to ask them, “Why in the world to you want to motivate yourself to write if you’re not already motivated?  FLY.  BE FREE.”  That’s like me asking a chemist, “How can I motivate myself to memorize the Periodic Table?”  I had that dream for a few weeks in high-school chemistry, but I’ve let it go. Now, I don’t care.  If I need to find an element, I’ll look it up.    

 

Changing your mind is not the same as when you stop trying. 

 

Having known so many writers in my life, I’ve come to the conclusion that there are four ways writers sabotage their own lives as writers: The first is basic: You want to write, but you don’t write.  Writing is the act of putting pen to paper, or fingertip to keyboard, or mouth to microphone, and composing sentences.  It may be a list of goals, a journal entry, a poem, a short story, a novel chapter–but it is some form of creation with words.  It’s amazing how many people want to be writers, but don’t write.  It’s amazing how many people blame it on not having enough time.  As the mother of a 19-month-old, I know it’s hard to find time to write when you’re raising a family.  But remember this: I knew a very fine columnist at the Miami Herald, Ana Veciana-Suarez, who wrote her first novel right after her husband died suddenly at the age of 35, when she had just had their fifth child.  If you really want to write, you WILL find the time.  WRITERS WRITE. 

 

The second act of sabotage: You write, but you don’t finish what you write.  I’ve known too many people who got lost in their unfinished novels, or who couldn’t follow a project through.  WRITERS LEARN TO WRITE PROJECTS FROM BEGINNING TO END.

 

 

The fourth act of sabotage: You submit what you write, but you don’t re-submit it.  My college roommate, who was also a writer, had to send out 40 query letters before she found an agent to accept her first novel.  The agent never could sell it–but sold her second one.  When I was in college, I wrote a novella in a course taught by a wonderful writer named Sheila Schwartz.  Sheila believed my piece was publishable, and encouraged me to send it out despite my own doubts.   One of the first places I submitted it, a large young-adult publishing imprint, sent me back a rejection slip with an editorial note.  The editor told me, in the most enthusiastic of terms, that my piece was too short at 90 pages–and if I could expand it to a 200-page novel, she believed she would be able to publish it.  I couldn’t do it.  I wasn’t ready.  I froze. 

 

Another example of a manuscript that was not re-submitted right away was The Between. 

 

Some quick background on The Between:   I wrote short stories for years before I started writing this novel, which is the first novel-length manuscript I wrote from beginning to end.  Other attempts had already run out of steam.  I hadn’t found the right book yet.

 

I wrote The Between out of necessity. 

 

As I look at the heartbreaking devastation left in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, I send out my warmest thoughts to any of you present today who are from, or have friends or family from, the hurricane-affected areas. I’m reminded that The Between was born as the result of another hurricane, this one in 1992.  Hurricane Andrew.

 

It was going to be one of those years.  I’d just lost my best friend to our love affair.  My paternal grandmother died suddenly.  And Hurricane Andrew had destroyed the sight of everything I knew in my childhood home of Cutler Ridge, Florida, south of Miami.  There were curfews, loss of power, and martial law, those all-too-familiar images from the times when hurricanes reign.  I had reached the lowest emotional point of my life–and I conceived a character who was supposed to have drowned as a child, so each day he awoke to a new nightmare of alternate realities. 

 

 

To motivate myself to finish the manuscript, I gave myself a deadline.  A Hollywood studio sponsored a screenwriting contest, and they were accepting novels as well.   That gave me nine months.  I didn’t want to go to Hollywood for a year if I won, but the deadline got me through the book.  I forsook my friends and forgot to pay my cable bill.  I finished my first novel.  I submitted it to the contest.  Eight-thousand other people sent submissions, too.  I didn’t win.

 

Somehow, I forgot Mrs. Estaver’s advice about the wall of rejection slips.  I thought, OK, well, I guess I’m not good enough yet.  I put my manuscript in a drawer.  A couple of months later, I started working on a new book, this one entitled My Soul to Keep. 

 

A year later, I went through an emotional crisis.  My dating life was a mess.  I didn’t like my day job.  I complained to my journal that I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.  What was I doing to bring about this horrible feeling?  Usually if I was being true to my writing, everything else was tolerable, and I was writing every day.

 

Then, I remembered the manuscript for The Between sitting, forgotten, in my drawer.  I had submitted it only once, and that wasn’t enough.  I had to submit it again.  I had to try to get an agent.  The first agency I tried rejected it.  But a Miami-based agent who worked out of her home, Janell Walden Agyeman, wanted to represent it.  Three weeks later–after I’d received yet another rejection from a literary magazine based at a minor Miami college–Janell sold The Between for more than my annual salary at the newspaper.  Granted, that’s not saying much–but believe me, it was a lot of money to me.

 

Becoming a published writer did not automatically eliminate rejection from my life.  The Living Blood, which won the 2002 American Book Award, was originally rejected by two houses, including the publisher of my first two novels.  The nonfiction civil rights memoir I co-authored with my mother, Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights, was in circulation for years before it was sold.  My last novel, The Good House–which my husband, Steven Barnes, and I just sold as a screenplay to Fox Searchlight Pictures–was rejected before it was published. 

 

You have to send out what you write, and send it out again and again.  

 

The very core of your life in the arts will be your ability to take chances.  If you do not, one day it may be you who feels a prick of pain when a 19-year-old confides her dreams of being a writer and you hear yourself saying, “Oh, yeah–I used to want to be a writer.”

 

                                                           *****

 

I was shocked when my current agent, John Hawkins, called me one day and asked if I would be willing to talk to the Alex Haley Estate about writing a novel based on the late novelist’s research on Madam C.J. Walker, reputed to be the nation’s first black female millionaire.  Although history has become one of the hallmarks of my writing, at that point I had only published two novels, and My Soul to Keep had a handful of historical chapters.  I had no faith that I could sustain a novel set in the late-1800s and at the turn-of-the-century.  My first inclination was to decline.

 

Here, I have to give my husband a great deal of credit.  He told me I would be crazy to walk away from that opportunity.  Yes, there was always the remote possibility that attaching my name to Alex Haley’s could result in a runaway best-seller.  (It didn’t).  But most importantly, Steve pointed out, this was the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see the process of one of the nation’s most celebrated novelists.  To learn from a great author I had never had the honor to meet.

 

 

What I learned about Alex Haley and his process was fascinating.  But in some ways, what I remember most is what I learned about Alex Haley as the human writer.  In one of the interview transcripts, Haley’s brother, Ambassador George Haley, was giving Haley a pep-talk.  You proved yourself with Roots, he said.  Apparently, near the time of his death, Alex Haley was suffering from a kind of writer’s block, a lack of confidence that he could write anything to rival Roots.  That’s one of the reasons he had never finished–never even really started–the Madam C.J. Walker novel.

 

In a sense, Haley had forgotten his own advice, which I quoted in the text of the novel: You throw your hat over the fence, and climb over and get it.

 

I wish there was one easy answer to help each of you get over the fence.  One fool-proof scientific formula for becoming the writer you want to be.  But there isn’t.  I once sat on a panel of first-time novelists, and we each had very different, very unorthodox stories about how we made our first sales.  There are preparations and steps, but there is no actual manual.  One day, it just happens...and it has happened.  And that golden day, you’ll be on the phone to your publisher’s publicity department, saying, “Why aren’t you doing more to promote my book?”   As James Baldwin said, “The price for one’s pursuing any calling or profession is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.”  That’s a whole different talk.

 

But I will call on each of you to find that most courageous place inside you–the one that took the time and money to Maui, when you may never be the writer you hope to be.  Disappointment is real.  Good work is ignored.  Good writers give up every single day.  But you have thrown your hats over the fence.  And once you’ve climbed this one, another will be waiting.

 

 

Joan and Jim have become my role-models for how to live my senior years.  She’s writing as much as ever, and he taught himself to navigate the sky.  On a trip back to Longview three weeks ago, I sat in their backyard with Joan, and Jim flew his plane over the house–as he always did–and she waved up at him.

 

Last week, I received an email from a mutual friend, a forwarded newspaper article.  The heading: LONGVIEW MAN DIES IN SMALL PLANE CRASH.  I knew what the article would say before I read it.  Jim was dead.  He’d taken his plane on a trip to Idaho from Washington, and he never made it home.  Officials blamed the crash on mechanical failure.

 

Jim’s death sent me into a spin.  For the first few hours, I wished he’d never taken the flying lessons.  He was older than seventy, but he was healthy.  Who knows how long he would have lived?

 

But Jim threw his hat over the fence.  He had a dream left undone, and he had vowed not to go to the next place with any regrets.  Oh, yeah–I used to want to be a pilot.  Jim lived out the very philosophy that has sustained me since I first wrote “Baby Bobby.”  We OWE it to ourselves to climb over that fence. 

 

Yes, planes crash.  Yes, good stories never get published.  Mountains of them. 

 

And yet here we are, sitting on the runway, revving our engines all the same.  Here we are, putting our fears behind us, our faces toward the sky. 

 

Every single one of us deserves the chance to fly.

 

Thank you.