Amy Sue Nathan

Linen

I was ironing a pale blue, linen, button down shirt — getting ready to meet friends for dinner.  I flipped the shirt to iron the back, and smoothed the collar to iron it flat.  And then I wondered, on a thirty minute drive to the restaurant, how was the shirt not going to be wrinkled?

And then I remembered, linen is supposed to wrinkle.

Then, as I continued ironing,  I thought about writing — and how it’s not much different than linen.

We want our writing to be smooth and pristine, but it’s supposed to have some wrinkles.  Wrinkles add personality – make it real.  Wrinkles – even in our faces — are signs of who and what we are and where we’ve been.  Wrinkles in writing can be anything from quirks in the method — with bobble heads lined up — to the idiosyncrasies in our characters.  Often we aspire to writing that looks a certain way – and it’s not that we shouldn’t do our best and make things as perfect as possible – but a little wrinkling means you’re not too uptight to live and write fully – to just be yourself and put yourself out there with the little bits that make you — and your writing — uniquely you.

How stiff and unnatural it would be to arrive in an unwrinkled linen shirt and how boring writing would be without the personal wrinkles of each individual author.