1. Take a spelling test in third grade and spell believe as “B-E-L-I-V-E.” Show it to your father who lets out a howling belly laugh. Allow him to taunt you by singing “I Believe I Can Fly,” replacing every “Believe” with “Belive” for the rest of the night.
2. The next day, have your father place a blank sheet of college-ruled paper in front of you and tell you to spell “believe,” correctly, one hundred times. Roll the word around in your mouth. Grip a fat triangular pencil your father brought home from work. Realize that you hate this pencil, and that you hate spelling “believe” even more. Look around at the basement walls that don’t belong to your parents, and wonder what the owners of this house believed in.
3. Give the paper to your father and watch him hang it above his desk.
4. Listen to him say that he “belives” in you every day before school. Roll your eyes, because someone told you once that’s what you should do when your dad is embarrassing you.
5. Turn twelve and watch the family who lived here before us return to their house. Not yours. Lose the paper full of “belives” when you move and with it your faith in material things.
6. A few years later, be inspired to write your eighth grade graduation speech next to a print of Naomi Shihab Nye on the wall of your English classroom. Preach how we all ought to believe more in kindness. Stand in your red gown in front of 3,000 people and as you start to speak, notice that you spelled “believe” wrong in the first sentence.
7. Cycle through beliefs as you grow older: a belief in winning, in love, in money, in God. But always come back to your belief in writing. Hear your father’s voice in the back of your head telling you that he never wants you to forget how to believe, both in print and in practice.
8. Get to college. Write a lot. Write as much as people let you. But, make sure you pursue a “practical” major. Writing, as you know, will not pay your bills (at least, that’s what your mother says).
9. Let your anxieties keep you from writing. Become paralyzed by your inability to navigate storytelling without provoking a world that is already so agitated.
10. Call your father after class one day. Listen to him say he wrote a novel, once, as a young man trying to perceive a world contrary to the one he lived in. One so full of belief no one knew what to do with it.
11. Almost hang up, but before you do, hear your father tell you it makes him very sad to see you haven’t written in so long. “It’s been months,” you hear, “since you’ve published anything.” “Writing could save you.”
12. Cry, again. Of course. Think of the little girl who sat in the basement, writing the word “believe” out, over and over again. Close your eyes and see it everywhere. Hear it in your father’s voice. Let it envelop you.
13. Sit down and try to write once more. Title your notebook page “how to believe in something.” Try to belive.
