I’d always loved reading and telling stories, but I never really seriously tried to write anything until I was 10, when I confessed to my teacher that I wanted to be a writer. She encouraged me to show her some of my stories, which meant I had to write something for another person’s consumption. For the first time.
I’m not going to lie. It was horrible. The plot was based on a dream I had. The characters were derivative. It was handwritten, in pencil, on notebook paper, complete with bad cover art. I shudder when I think back on it.
But my teacher encouraged me. She left me kind notes and asked me to show her more stories. A few sequels followed, then I started to fill composition books with journal entries and the start of a few novels, and then I started to peck the stories out on an old typewriter. (To paraphrase William Goldman’s The Princess Bride, this was after computers but before word processors; the only computer I’d seen took up the better part of a room and belonged to a bank our class visited on a field trip.)
By the time I was in high school, I’d written a lot of crap, but that’s traditionally the way you learn how to write. Eventually you either give up writing or you give up on crap and write better. I wrote for school assignments. I wrote for state writing competitions. Then I got brave enough to submit a story for a DAW anthology. I made my first professional sale at the tender age of 19.
Looking back at that story, I am acutely aware of its flaws, largely having to do with a thin plot and underdeveloped characters. But it was a start, and I sold a few more stories to various magazines. I’m still proud of most of them, which is more than I can say for anything I wrote before high school. In college I spent my sophomore year as editor of our weekly newspaper, which forced me to write an editorial every week. There’s nothing like having to write to regular deadline. I learned about the discipline of writing, about the challenge of writing to an audience, about the struggle to come up something fresh to say over and over again. In my senior year, the English faculty selected me as editor of the literary magazine, since I’d been a contributor for a couple years before that. I collected writing awards.
Unfortunately, the shiny wore off some time after graduation. I had a few more sales, but I collected far more rejection slips. I persevered. At one point I scored a gig of blogging for a foodie site, then of writing scripts for their instructional videos. The blogging was easy; it was far easier than the weekly editorials I’d turned out in college, especially since this time I was getting paid. The scripts were more challenging, but I learned to enjoy them, and I was thrilled to see the videos on YouTube, especially seeing my name in the final credits.
But my real love has always been fiction, and there came a point where the rejection slips wore me down. I struggled to come up with anything new. I got to the point where I told myself that I’d had enough. Obviously I was a flash-in-the-pan, a minor minor talent. Better to just footle around and not try for anything so silly as selling my work to strangers. Keep an online journal. Dabble in fanfic. Don’t reach for anything more.
Then I had my stroke, and lost full function of my right hand. That was my rock bottom. I could barely type. Write? What was the point of trying? Nobody wanted to buy anything I wrote. I didn’t think anybody would care to read anything I wrote.
But somewhere inside me, a small voice whispered, No. I still had stories to tell. I started digging out trunk stories from years ago, looking at them with fresh eyes. This story was crap and not worth salvaging. That story was decent and needed a revision. This other story was good, needing only a light polish before I sent it out again.
Last year, thanks to encouragement from a writer friend, I started submitting again. At first I told myself that I had to get some kind of positive feedback by December. A sale would be great, but a personalized rejection would do. The end of December came and went, but I’ve continued to write and submit. Guess there are some deadlines I’m willing to ignore.
I’m still a writer.
Rachel
I'm a writer, a knitter/spinner/weaver, a young stroke survivor, and a type 2 diabetic.
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