I have so many fun things to post here, each day, as I make my journey public! But, for starters, I thought I would write a little bit about how I got started with my dream to write!
It will probably sound really corny and cliche`, but I promise it is true! When I was in the third grade, just about to turn 8, I read the book "Little Women". I fell in love with the book. It was one of those books that left me wanting more and dreaming my own little day dreams about life with Meg and Jo. With all the passion of an 8 year old, I told myself (can still picture where I was standing-next to the third grade door just after recess) that I was going to grow up and be like Jo. I was going to be a writer someday. I knew it in every part of my being, and I couldn't wait to grow up. Now, at that impressionable age, I figured the only thing you had to do to grow up and be a writer was move to New York City and the rest would just happen! It's no wonder why reading, writing and NYC are three of my all-time favorites in life!
Childhood continued on for me, and I didn't do a whole lot to move that dream forward, other than read everything I could get my hands on. I had an insatiable appetite for reading, with the series of Anne of Green Gables and all the Little House on the Prairie Books being among my favorites. Then when I was 12, I decided the time had come for me to write my first book. I was so excited! It was summer time, I was bored and what better way to fill the time than to write a novel! I worked all afternoon, and by night time, I was so proud of my accomplishment! A full 12 pages of notebook paper contained my entire novel!
From that time on, I don't remember life without a notebook or two and a million stories bouncing through my head. I wrote everywhere I went, including during history class. I have several boxes of all the scribbled notebook papers that contain my crude and young attempts at becoming an author. At the ripe old age of 19, I typed (with a typewriter) a manuscript that equaled 261 pages (amazing the details you remember even years later) and sent it to a publishing company. I was so excited! I was so naive! Of course, I was devastated a few months later when I received that first rejection letter. I wanted to quit and give up for good!
Fortunately, I didn't, I couldn't. Writing was such a part of me. Even while I took time to serve a mission for my church, I wrote on P-days, later when I took a job as a legal assistant, I wrote over my lunch breaks, and in the car when stopped at a light. Once I was married and started having babies, it became a bit more difficult to write in an organized fashion. I still wrote, but it was more in journaling things, when emotions would well up inside of me so much that the only way to release them was through words on paper.
Soon after the birth of my third child, I decided to go back to school. I was able to take online classes and still be at home with my young family, as my husband was busy with law school. I took every English and creative writing class I could get my hands on. I thrived on reading good literature, analyzing it and writing about it. A fire began to grow within me that was even more unquenchable than my love of reading as a child. I thought about the writing craft while my kids played at the park, I had a notebook stashed in the diaper bag while they played an McDonald's, and my imagination took me to a million other places than there. I fell in love with stories like The Lottery, Paul's Case and Those Who Walk Away From Omelas. I gained new friends in Flannery O'Connor and Charlotte Gilman. I wanted to write like them. I wanted to stir emotions the way they did to me!
I continued to read, and study and write! But now it was different because I had professors reading what I wrote. Some of them loved my work, some of them did not. I remember one professor in particular, that hated everything I did and graded me accordingly! I was convinced he had it out for me. I learned then that writing and art are subjective! It doesn't mean you quit!
Even with the birth of three more children, including one who had significant health problems, developmental delays and required a lot of work, I still wrote or thought about writing and mostly read about writing! I have lots of books on the craft of writing, but several are my dear friends! I turn to them with every case of writer's block. I will be referring to them often on this blog and share the exercises that help me the most!
And here I find myself, a few weeks from turning 38 with still the same pipe dream of becoming an author! I don't live in NYC. I don't have agent's numbers on my speed dial and I am still waiting for that first letter of acceptance from a publisher! It doesn't matter. If I have learned nothing else it's that writer's write, and if I ever want to see my work in print, I have to do just that! Even if it means writing a million words before 100,000 words are turned into a novel, it is what I will do! Someday, I will realize my dream. And if I don't, I just hope that my children and grandchildren will enjoy the boxes of notebook paper and the hard drives of manuscripts they will be left!
Techniques of the Selling Writer