My working life is represented by over 100 books sitting on my shelf, each one bearing my name.  An accomplishment I do not hold lightly.  These books have been written and published over the course of 45 years, and that bears mentioning, too.  I have worked long and steadily.

For 30 of those years I have made my living doing this work.  Note the discrepancy between publishing for 45 and making a living by that publishing for 30.  It took me 15 years before I, even once, combining income from publishing, teaching, lecturing and speaking in schools, earned enough money to survive on my own.  And keeping that living going after it finally reached that level has required a lot of cobbling, a lot of taking on varied writing projects (thus over 100 books), a lot of teaching, a lot of climbing onto airplanes, a lot of repeating myself in front of a sea of wiggly kids.  But I did it.  And I’m so grateful I could that there is hardly room left over for pride in the accomplishment of it all. 

Looking back I see intense hard work.  Good work.  Always good.  And every bit as clearly I see serendipity.  Winning a Newbery Honor Award in 1987 for On My Honor was a major example of serendipity.  Winning any award requires serendipity.  While it can be presumed that a book that garners an important award is pretty good, there will always be a dozen more books—no, dozens—of equal value that year, books that didn’t happen to catch the award-givers’ eyes.  So serendipity lay in the calling out of my book from the pack and it certainly lay in the timing of the call.  I had just cast aside the safety net of a 28-year marriage when the award announcement came. 

With the award, I woke to find myself the flavor of the month.  Doors were opened where I hadn’t even known there were doors.  And I walked through them . . . walked and walked.

I never forgot serendipity, though, or assumed any special deserving.  A fellow author on the speaking circuit once said to me, “If you begin to think these awards are important, just ask your hosts who they awarded last year and watch them struggle to remember!”

All this is real and true, and all of it is history.  The advantage of being, by anyone’s measure, an old woman is that so much falls away.  So much of the need for attention.  So much of the desire to compete.  So much of assuming the results of my labor to be more important than the labor of others around me.

Looking back over the results of these many years, I know in the most profound way that my books matter very, very little.

What does matter?  What mattered yesterday and will continue to matter tomorrow?  That’s easy.  The day by day process of sitting down to write, of honing my skill, of mining my truth.

If I didn’t always recognize that reality in those first moments of being on display, it came home emphatically in the years that followed. Absolutely no correlation exists between the amount of time, the amount of love, I invest in a book and its success out there in the world.  Books I have created in a couple of hours on a playful afternoon support me, year after year.  Books I have labored over with passion and deep feeling, books that represent my highest effort and best work, can turn into smoke. 

So what is important?   Simply paying attention.  Enjoying the words as they flow through me.  Reaching deeper and deeper for ideas.  That is the key to a good writing life.

To a good life. 

How grateful I am to be an old woman who rises every day to this work.

Work that uses my experience, my intelligence, every scrap of talent I possess . . . that, I can promise you, friends, is the deepest gift I know.