Just the Right Amount of Adventure

I’m so thrilled to be posting on Emu’s Debuts for the very first time! I’ve had my eye on this blog since my querying days (okay, years), so writing this post feels like one of those moments when something big (or small) happens and you think, “This dream is really coming true!”

And yet.

When this post goes live, I’ll be headed to a cabin in the mountains with no WiFi, where I’ll be spending three days drafting my second book that’s really my fifth book. Because there are times to blog and tweet and research and live life abundantly, and there are times when you have to just open up your manuscript and write and write and write. It’s all about balance, isn’t it?

My kids are signed up for a Shakespeare camp this summer (one of the advantages of living near the Utah Shakespeare Festival), and for his audition, my son and I found this monologue and both fell in love:

“The test of an adventure is that when you’re in the middle of it, you say to yourself, ‘Oh, now I’ve got myself into an awful mess; I wish I were sitting quietly at home.’ And the sign that something’s wrong with you is when you sit quietly at home wishing you were out having lots of adventure.”

~ Thornton Wilder, The Matchmaker, Act IV

(It goes on, and it’s wonderful, and you should probably just read the whole play.)

There’s so much we can learn about life simply by being writers. We know what it means to be obsessed and apathetic, despairing and joyful, rejected and triumphant…the list goes on and on. But there’s a depth and dimension that comes to our writing from getting out there and having real-life, non-writing adventures. We all know this, of course, but sometimes it bears repeating. (And sometimes, when you go to a cabin in the woods with a bunch of neurotic writers, it could go either way. *cues scary music*)

So what I wish for you, writing friends, is that you find that balance again in your life, and that you fill your summer with “just the right amount of sitting quietly at home, and just the right amount of…adventure!”

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Elaine Vickers is the author of LIKE MAGIC (HarperCollins, 2016) and loves writing middle grade and chapter books when she’s not teaching college chemistry or hanging out with her fabulous family. She’s a member of SCBWI and represented by Ammi-Joan Paquette of EMLA. You can find her at elainevickers.com on the web, @ElaineBVickers on Twitter, here on Pinterest, or generally anywhere there are books and/or food for her consumption. 🙂