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Writer Mandy Len Catron finally finished a book proposal she began in 2019. A publisher liked it, but was hesitant to proceed because of similar books on the market. Then someone asked, “Do you think this book needs to exist?” She realized it was “started by a person I used to be” before the pandemic, before teaching, before two toddlers and a crisis pregnancy. “I had been trying to write someone else’s book.” So, Mandy began again, writing about her crisis pregnancy experience. “It felt less like making sentences and more like letting them flood through me. It was as though the draft already existed.” She now advises her students “to transmit a feeling, an experience, an idea that is wholly their own… so that another person might understand something new and specific about what it means to be human.” Tell the story that needs to exist, “that needs to be written, the one only you can write, in the words that belong only to you.”
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