“The necessity for pursuing whatever fire delights and sustains you”

Can you imagine if EB White had decided Charlotte's Web wasn't worth writing because it wasn't about war?

Next month, I promise to tell you what I learned after a month of being a Barnes & Noble Monthly Pick author who didn’t *quite* make the NYT bestseller list but came close. My thinking about publishing changed a lot! If you bought a copy of The Deepest Lake, thank you so much. Also, I have spots open in July and August for book coaching and developmental editing. (Email me for more info.) On to today’s main post!

This month, I want to talk about how important it is to follow our own compasses when it comes to what we choose to write about.

EB White is the person who got me thinking about this. I became curious about the Charlotte’s Web author after discovering—completely serendipitously, after some random book browsing—that he was a more complex, insecure, and passionate man than I’d previously realized.¹

In 1938, with the Axis powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan united to wreak havoc upon the world, White was best known for his lightweight writing, described as “gossamer” by a critic of the New Yorker. With World War II on the horizon, why was White still writing about terriers and guppies?

EB White: a man who was happiest when busy on his farm, tending animals and studying nature

White got the chance to write some serious pieces for Harpers. But even so, he wasn’t a political writer, first and foremost. Thoreau’s Walden was his favorite book. Even at his new Harpers gig, he couldn’t resist writing about things like birding alongside columns about democracy.

One night while White was tending to some recently hatched chicks in the family barn, his son Joe came out to deliver the latest horrible war news from a radio broadcast. White later wrote, “Countries are ransacked, valleys drenched with blood. Though it seems untimely I will publish my belief in the egg, the contents of the egg, the warm coal, and the necessity for pursuing whatever fire delights and sustains you.”

With his wife’s strong encouragement, and despite bouts of depression and one nervous collapse, EB White spent the war years writing Stuart Little, a book about a mouse, based on some stories he’d told his nieces and nephews. After that, despite White’s lingering fear of nuclear Armageddon, which he regarded as a dire peril, he wrote Charlotte’s Web, considered one of the most beloved books of all time.

Do you wish he’d written something else? I don’t.

If you are a writer, whatever you are writing—however your worldview and voice make it to the page—I applaud you. If you are a reader, someone who buys books, which means that you support books, bookstores, libraries, and publishing, I applaud you, too.

Some of you, I know, are writing directly about difficult things. I often doubt my own relevance as a writer, but when I look at my friends, peers, and literary heroes, I have no doubt. Words matter. Books and libraries matter. Facts and stories matter. (And so do protests! If you attended a No Kings protest over the weekend, thank you! And now back to books…)

Last month, I attended a meeting of a new book club and one woman questioned why the novel we were discussing, James by Percival Everett, was getting so much attention. She asked us, Doesn’t everyone already know about slavery and the cruelties portrayed in Everett’s book?

Well, no. They don’t. And very soon, if the current U.S. administration keeps having its way, even more people won’t. You might have seen the news story in April, about the National Park Service’s removal (and after an uproar, reinstatement) of Harriet Tubman’s photo and historical details from a page about the Underground Railroad.

Thank goodness we have people like Percival Everett, telling a compelling new version of a story about truths that not everyone knows or wants to know—truths that someday may be hard to find.

James by Percival Everettt is a serious and valuable book. But so is Charlotte’s Web. At its core are messages about friendship, sacrifice, and the unavoidable reality of death. In fact, the book’s themes are so mature that some early readers questioned whether it should be made available to children.² Thank goodness librarians and booksellers decided that both adults and children could appreciate EB White’s story.

Whatever you’re writing, keep going. We need all of it: the stories that face dark truths head-on, the stories that approach those topics from a slant, and the stories that seem to “merely” entertain but are in fact so important to our well-being.

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Do you ever question if your writing is “serious” enough considering the terrible things happening in the world today? Do you have a favorite recent book, movie or TV show that seems like a “mere” entertainment but in fact has been a key to your well-being during these anxious times? Tell us about it.

1. Regarding the surprising passions of EB White: In the late 1920s he had an affair with Katharine Angell, then a New Yorker fiction editor, who was unhappily married at the time. White and Angell later wed and divided their lives between New York and a Maine farm. I am reading several biographies of White now because I am so surprised and curious about the tender and uplifting White-Angell relationship. It’s so unusual to read about a positive marriage in which a woman wasn’t pressured to sacrifice her career for love or family.

2. Evidently, the book was officially challenged not because it confronts the reality of death but because it features talking animals, which a Kansas parents’ group considered blasphemous. Go figure!