Must one leave home to be a writer?

Have you ever stamped on a good idea, told yourself I can’t write that, what will people think? It’s hard enough being a writer without censoring your thoughts before you can even get them down on the page or screen, and your prose is likely to suffer when you’re busy trying not to offend the judge that sits in your head. But shaking off these inhibitions isn’t always easy, especially when they stem from our childhood notions of what’s right and wrong. That’s why I love this quote from Paul Theroux via Thought Catalog:

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Notice how many of the Olympic athletes effusively thanked their mothers for their success? “She drove me to my practice at four in the morning,” etc. Writing is not figure skating or skiing. Your mother will not make you a writer. My advice to any young person who wants to write is: leave home.

Similarly, in an interview with Lisa Allardice for the Guardian Review, Alice Munro, the new Nobel laureate said:

[W]hen you are growing up you have to pull apart from what your mother wants or needs, you’ve got to go your own way

Taking down one’s Athena posters or whatever’s the current equivalent and moving into a grotty flat with half a dozen friends is only the first stage of leaving home; psychological separation from our parents can be much trickier, and some don’t ever achieve it. How do writers break free of parental commandments to write as ourselves? Greg tells me Lorrie Moore told students to write to shock their parents and Emma Darwin sometimes recommends writers (see comments) imagine their parents are dead.

The metaphorical death of our parents is so essential to growing up it’s the stuff of myth and fairytales. The failure to separate can produce some interesting writing, too.

So what’s all this got to do with my newly published story, Had to Be You?  To say much more would spoil it; why not have a read and let me know what you think?

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