This week’s theme answers the following question:
At what moment did writing for you turn from being just a hobby to play around in to something you took seriously enough to create a salable novel, and a resulting career?
Hooo, boy. This has a complicated answer. Well, simple and complicated. The simple answer: I always knew. I never just played around with writing. I sent out my first story to a pro magazine when I was 16. But, as most things are, the truth is more complicated. Let me give you a timeline:
Second Grade: We had an assignment: write a story. I’m not sure what the other kids did, but I turned in four pages (of that cheap beige grade school paper, but still) of a thing called “Sally the Horse” that was something of a feminist retelling of The Black Stallion, which I had just read, and which had no girls in it. It needed girls. Apparently, the teacher, Mrs. Garnett, was very impressed. She was in the habit of giving kids M&M’s as rewards. Get a perfect score on a spelling test? Have an M&M. (I’m not sure she could get away with this now.) I got a whole handful of M&M’s for “Sally the Horse.” The class was scandalized. So early on, I got a message: write well = get paid. (Hey, I was 8, that whole handful of M&M’s was a fortune.)
Second Grade on: I was blessed with teachers who gave lots of creative writing assignments. I loved every single one.
Eighth Grade English: I got the best creative writing assignment ever. The teacher (Miss Stufft this time) hadn’t finished describing the assignment and I was already plotting and scheming and figuring out what I was going to do. I came up for air long enough to realize that everyone else in the class was complaining: “Oh man, this is so hard, why do we have to do this, waaaaaaaaaah!” And I’m thinking, What do you mean this is hard? Would you rather be diagramming sentences? (I think I was one of the last generation to have to diagram sentences.) I had a huge epiphany: Not everyone likes to write. But I like to write. Writing is something I can do that other people can’t. I embraced writing with a white-hot passion that burns to this day.
Eighth Grade through the end of college: I entered every writing contest I could. I won two big ones, a statewide thingy for high school students ($25 gift certificate for the Tattered Cover, woot!), and the Military Lifestyle Magazine Fiction Contest in 1994 ($700. I used it to buy a saddle and bridle for the horse I had just accidentally bought. Long story.) It was just enough validation to encourage me to send my work out to magazines, to try to become a “real” pro writer.
As a scrawny geeky kid who had trouble making friends and was no good at sports (I wish someone had told me I would get good at sports later, after I stopped growing and being all awkward.), writing was a refuge. I walked into bookstores and realized that writing was also a business. People got paid for it. Maybe I could, too. I was probably fifteen when I started telling people I wanted to be a writer.
By the end of college, I hadn’t found a career. There was nothing I wanted to do but write fiction. So, I had to figure out how to make a living at it. (Answer: Write novels, publish them with major publishers, wash rinse repeat.) It would be about 11 years before I quit working any kind of day job. But the goal was always there: make a living at it, because I had no passion for anything else.
