(In case you missed it, here's the #WhatsYourStory post I shared on author Amy Rivers's website, Kissing Authors and Astronauts.)
Hello
everyone, and thanks for joining me for my #WhatsYourStory post. I wish I could
share with you the magical formula for writing success, but my journey is more
of a cautionary tale. Not in a dramatic, I-can’t-believe-I-escaped-with-my-life
way, but in a jeez-I-have-made-a-whole-lot-of-mistakes way. My lifelong
blessing and curse is that I have the kind of brain that loves to make up
stories. On some level, I always knew I wanted to be a writer. It just took me
a hella long time to figure out how to go about it.
A
peek inside the way-back machine reveals that I was a shy child with an extra
helping of timidity on the side. Forget wallflower; I was more like the
wallpaper. Speaking to anyone outside my immediate circle of family and friends
was torture—heart-pounding, face-flushing, voice-squeaking torture. As a
result, I stayed pretty quiet, which gave me ample opportunity for watching and
listening. I loved to read, and as I grew older, I discovered that writing
words down was a whole lot more fun than saying them out loud.
Fast
forward to my late-twenties. I had a job I didn’t care much about and an
anthropology degree I wasn’t using. It seemed like the perfect time to “be” a
writer. I had plenty of ideas, so I did what I thought a writer should do: I
sat down and (metaphorically) vomited out a novel. When my sister came home to
visit at Christmas, I put it in front of her travel-weary eyes and waited for
the praise. (Spoiler alert: it never came.)
Undaunted,
I pressed on and began sending out my uncritiqued, unedited hot mess to whoever
was accepting unsolicited submissions.
Ahem. For anyone who
wonders… (raises megaphone to lips) Do. Not. Do. This.
I
was thrilled when I signed with an agent. It felt so validating, I didn’t care
that she required money up front. (Red flag? What red flag?) When my emails to
her resulted in terse, uninformative replies, I thought it was my fault for
being a needy writer. Only when I saw her name show up on a list of worst
agents did I start to get the message. I wasn’t an undiscovered genius. I was a
sucker with a penchant for adverbs.
Around
the same time, I got pregnant with my first son. The second one came along two
years later. Staying home raising two young boys was wonderful and
fulfilling…and completely unproductive from a writing perspective. I
occasionally had the time or the energy for it, but rarely both together.
But
my dream to write never died. In fact, it became more insistent. It sat quietly
in the corner and give me that plaintive look. You know the one. I knew it
would wait forever if it had to, but that didn’t seem quite fair to either of
us. So, I started writing again. This time, it felt different, for I had
realized a great truth: just because writing was easy for me didn’t mean I was
good at it.
Once
it sank in—a humbling moment, to be sure—I began to understand what it really
means to be a writer. I went to conferences and classes, I read books and
blogs. I joined a critique group of wise women writers. I made my peace with
killing my darlings, as the expression goes. I kept at learning the craft, and
by the time my first novel was published, I knew I had something I could be
proud of. Sure, it had the gestation period of a blue whale times ten, but it
was out in the world. With my name on the front.
I’m
not a fast or prolific writer, but I’m still working at it. I’m still learning.
And every time I sit down at the keyboard, I try to do it a little better than
the time before.
