Today I want to share my experience and open it up to other emerging authors. I feel it’s a good exercise because if it turns out you’re actually good, you’ll inevitably get asked by someone, “When/Why/How did you decide to pursue writing?” or something along those lines. Each of us got here differently. The imposter syndrome kept telling me I needed an MBA or PhD or something… and that’s not gonna happen. I can’t afford it, plus, I’m not willing to spend my last decade or two chasing that dead dream.
I began writing somewhere around the time my little hands learned how to form letters and put them into semi-coherent strings, which coincided with me learning to read. I still recall the lightbulb moment when all those squiggles on the page formed words I could read. I read EVERYTHING. The phone book, encyclopedias, children’s classics, the Sunday funnies. It was a big deal in our house growing up. The library was a weekly trip, and if we couldn’t get a ride we would walk the 5-mile round trip with bags of books. So why am I telling you all about this early love of reading? Because that is where the love of writing sprang from within me.
The early years were typical; I made lovely cards and poetry filled with rainbows and kittens and fluffy fluff stuff you pin on your refrigerator with a magnet. In 2nd grade, I remember the teacher allowing me to tape extra paper under my art papers, so that I could explain what was going on in my pictures. I got a lot of compliments for it during conference week and I imagine I preened like an peacock. Later, as a teen, there was a lot of angst filled poetry and song lyrics. I really wanted to write songs back then. Carole King and Janice Ian were pulling my strings. Oh, and I won two essay contests at the school, and made some pocket change writing other student’s reports or essays. Even later, as a young adult, there were these (truly terrible) letters and essays and even more poetry and song lyrics that I would write while drunk. Everything went into PeeChee type folders, which were lost or thrown out over the years. Sometimes I burned them around a fire, like I was purging the old me. There was a lot of cringe.
I found myself a young adult with two children and an unstable marriage. I needed to work. I got a Pell grant and went to one of those now defunct business colleges that were popular in the 80’s. This was mid-1980’s. No one had home computers or cell phones yet. I enrolled in a program to learn basic computer skills (on a Radio Shack TRS80), spreadsheets, word processing, bookkeeping. I enjoyed it. I especially enjoyed thinking what I could do with a word processer of my own and one of my first rewards to myself was to get one. Not a computer per se, but traded up the manual typewriter for an electronic word processor. Oh boy, I was on the cutting edge! Especially loved that I could save and edit my work. I think the model was a Brother? It had a tiny window that allowed me to scroll through about 3 sentences at a time.
As I worked in the business world, my writing skills were directed at things like company histories, employee handbooks, policies and guidelines, product instruction, and marketing but it was my bookkeeping skills that were the most sought after. I did what I needed to do and decided that accountants got paid a lot more than bookkeepers, so in my middle-age years I enrolled in college part time. That was when I took my first writing classes as an adult and I loved them. They loved me back. The last day of the last of Fiction III, the instructor asked me to stay after, and he gave me back my graded final. A 6,000 word fiction short story, he told me it was publishable as is, and at the time I didn’t know what a compliment that was. He gave me a handwritten list of journals and magazines that I could submit to. I put everything in a folder for later. I had to make some real money.
By then, I had a new husband, a home computer, a mortgage and my very own laptop. We also had opened our own manufacturing shop. It was busy, hectic, and the years flew by. Somewhere in that time, our home was burglarized and my laptop was stolen. I had not backed it up, or if I had, the storage drive was missing. This was a terrible mistake on my part because I knew better. I backed up our business computer on a regular basis, but with my personal stuff I was sloppy and I paid for it. But at least I had the folder, right? Wrong. I could not find it anywhere, and I feared it had been tossed out in a move or mistaken for trash.
We ran our business for a good decade before the Great Recession of 2008 threatened to bankrupt us. Closing the business, we came up with new plans, looking toward getting to our retirement years and after. I knew writing would be a part of it. The last ten years before retiring, I worked in agriculture, accounting & HR (and gathering tons of experiences for a book about it someday!). One day in 2018, while cleaning out our big old shop, preparing to sell the house and property so we could finally retire, I found two boxes stashed way up high in the mezzanine. The first one I opened had the teacup sets and other old family mementos that I barely remembered packing 20 years earlier. The other one had some books and folders. I found that story and wasn’t prepared for the emotional reaction I had. I sat and cried. That was when I knew I just wanted to write, more than anything.
After I joined a couple of writers groups and shared some of my work, I was encouraged to think about publishing. That set me off on several years of learning about traditional vs. self-publishing… whew boy, I’m still learning and the industry is changing, evolving, constantly. It’s a wild woolly world out there, with millions upon millions of new books offered yearly.
It’s never been about the money but I’ve always been a realist. Writing demands that you give it your time and attention, and it doesn’t hurt if you have at least a few bucks to throw at it when polishing it up. Good editors and illustrators cost money. If one is going to usher their creation out into that wild woolly world, they ought to give it a fighting chance.
Covid sort of forced me into an early retirement, but I took a part time job at the local elementary school after things opened back up. It’s only 2 to 3 hours per day so allows me time to read, write, nap. It keeps me active and is giving me so many ideas for -you guessed it- even more stories! I like to write stories for the kiddo’s too! Over the last six years, I’ve written three novels, dozens of short stories, some poetry, few published and none of it while drunk! I gave that up decades ago. I also gave up burning my work. I gave up thinking I wasn’t good enough except when that imposter syndrome rears its ugly head but now I tell it to be nice or shut up. What I haven’t given up since the time I could grip a pencil in my fat little fist is the desire to tell stories. To make people think or laugh because of something I wrote would be my honor. I almost would feel badly to charge anything for it but I’m working on that.
If you’ve read this far and have a story to tell about your writing evolution, I’d love to hear it. Leave a comment or send me your story and I’ll share it under The Writing Corner at BookStack, or message me and I’ll try and figure how how to do the guest posting collab thing (must have Substack account for that
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