My uncle Bill gave me some good advice once: Write. Every day. Write something. Make an appointment and write. Just write.

That was a three years ago.

His advice came as I spent time each week working on a book that would be published under his name; and, indeed, that was only fair, since a great amount of the prose in that book was taken from two of his other books, edited down with some original devotional material added by me. It was a book that is now available on Amazon. I have two trim copies sitting on my shelf in their pale blue spines, read a few times, awaiting an audience that might appreciate their advice. But they don’t feel like mine, even if they contain sentences that I crafted and ideas that came from my mind. They feel like visitors who stayed with me for a while, visitors who enjoyed my hospitality and became good friends but now have gone about their independent lives without me.

Still, that book gave me reason to write. Maybe not every day. I had a baby and a toddler and my time at home was a jumble of Cheerios and board books and Elmo. But a couple of times each week, my beloved babysitter would drop by or it would be time for preschool and I would go to the coffee shop at the bottom of the mountain and write. And edit. And write more. I would write for seven hours, and then come home to my sweet babies.

I have always known that I wanted to write. Somewhere in my garage in a weather-sealed tub of journals, my twelve-year-old self laments, “I want to write. I have the urge. But that is all–an urge. Nothing more.” And I return to that sentiment again and again, knowing as well as that twelve-year-old person the difficulty of committing words to paper.

I wrote stories as a child. Pages and pages of fiction, booklets of poetry, and one modestly famous (in my nine-year-old mind) forty-stanza poem called The Dog Star. It was the highlight of my elementary literary achievement, appearing in abridged form (because really, who on earth would want to read a forty-stanza poem created by a fourth grader about an inventive farmhouse dog) in our school newsletter.

It’s difficult to peak at age nine.

I still remember writing that poem, sprawled out across my faux-quilt comforter in its calming shades of pink and green and white and yellow. I remember my parents in their bedroom across the hall, and shutting them out with a close of my door as the words flowed effortlessly onto the paper. I emerged after a couple of hours with my masterpiece in hand. I knew it was a winner. My classmates offered encouragement, and I was proud of my achievement, not with a haughty pride but with the pride that a sometimes-melancholy, bespectacled nine-year-old with ribbon barrettes needs to experience once in a while.

That poem would probably have passed into complete obscurity in my memory were it not for my fourth-grade teacher. He celebrated my poem. He had me recite it in front of my classmates and their parents at a class poetry reading. He recommended to my parents that I would benefit from reading the poetry of Robert Service–a very important-sounding and significant recommendation in my young mind, as if my life as a poet were laid out before me and was mine for the taking.

Write. Every day.

This is advice that I have not taken. I used to journal religiously–I have dozens of volumes crammed with my terrible handwriting, handwriting that was the subject of concerned, hushed conversation between my mother and Mrs. Merrill, the oft-maligned and strict-yet-undeneath-it-all-quite-dear third grade teacher. Those conversations resulted in a summer course of handwriting practice. Handwriting! Archaic now. But I’ve always been self-conscious about my handwriting. And now I type.

But I digress. I have journals crammed with thoughts. And then many more journals lost to computer upgrades and obsolete disk formats. I have dozens of pages of potential novels that have also been lost to the even-changing technological archive, but I doubt that we have lost anything of true value in the shift. I wrote for classes, of course. But though I was an English major in college, I don’t remember studying the art of writing. I read, I researched, I analyzed, I wrote, I became a historian. I pursued history to understand the context of the literature I loved, and ended up falling in love with history even more. Yes, I wrote–my 125-page thesis on Everyman was the triumph of my first Master’s degree. But when did I stop writing just for the fun of it?

A second Master’s degree was less about writing and much more about surviving. I loved studying in New York. I loved living ten blocks from The Cloisters, and losing myself in the medieval beauty, the stately crypt and the bejeweled manuscripts. My thirsty soul soaked it up. I read medieval drama, I studied medieval art and architecture, I soldiered on as the fellow in Medieval Studies and published the newsletter and tried to cram in my French and thousands of pages a week of reading. And I fell in love. Not with my program–with my husband. I met him two days after arriving in NYC and while I emerged from my year in New York clutching my hard-earned Master’s, I was far more ecstatic that I had met the love of my life.

Write. Every day.

As a newlywed, I had one month to finish all of the revisions on my thesis–a work which, unlike my first thesis, did not have my heart. It was utilitarian. It looked at some interesting questions. It checked the box. But I had set off for Fordham to become a doctor of medieval theology and history and spirituality, and only found one professor who seemed remotely interested in those particular questions. And so, I set that dream aside. Or, perhaps more honestly, I followed that dream to its logical end and realized that I didn’t want what lay at the end of that path. And in the crush of study, I had all but stopped writing anything with soul. I don’t blame that particular program–I was writing all the time. But I lacked the mental space and breathing room to create anything real.

Do other writers require space?

They must not, if they write every day. And perhaps I don’t either.

That was ten years ago. I finished my second Master’s degree, defended it, moved cross-country, got married, and settled into life as a newlywed in the span of four short weeks. Ten years ago.

In the past ten years, I have taught sixth grade, tossed out and re-written a Bible curriculum for said sixth graders, moved again, had two children, led worship, written songs, survived the blur and joy of small children, moved a third time, and begun a new life by the sea.

But I have all but stopped writing.

I think I need to write. Every day. Just write.