Once upon a time, I thought I would grow up to be a writer. Jo March did, after all, and Laura Ingalls. Betsy Ray and Anne Shirley. Do well in school, marry a nice man, write things. These are the storybook promises.
Then I went to college, and my first creative writing professor suggested I drop his course. You don’t want an F on your transcript, he explained, with what I imagine he thought was a perfect blend of kindness and pragmatism.
This isn’t a story about a girl who persevered. I didn’t push through. I didn’t dig deep and believe in myself. I believed him. I believed that if I hadn’t learned to write by my sophomore year of college, not yet 19 years old, I never would. The storybooks had suggested this, after all, and I just hadn’t noticed.
I’m not very creative, I would have told you, if you’d asked during my long career. Then I would have handed you a user guide or a policy manual. I would have put a memo on your chair, hoping you’d start reading before you even sat down. You would have learned, early on, to get a snack and a cup of coffee before you opened the email I sent. I wrote thousands of words every day, and still I knew: not a writer.
Towards the end of 2019, a doctor said I had cancer. He said stay home, there’s a nasty bug going around, which turned out to be COVID. The boss sold the company I worked for and I lost my job. My father had a stroke, and then another, and then he died. A different doctor finally said out loud that my mother had Alzheimer’s. It occurred to me: if I’m ever going to write a book, I should get on it. We are, as John Wayne said*, burning daylight.
The discovery draft went nowhere. A kind and pragmatic editor suggested I read Save the Cat!, and that helped. I participated in Katey Schultz’s Monthly Mentorship program and found my feet. I write each week with Katey’s Sustaining Circle, and most mornings in the room I think of as my daughter’s, even though she moved out 10 years ago.
I figure this’ll take five years. I’ve been in it for two, almost three. Pull up a chair, get a snack, and pour yourself a cup of coffee. I have a story to tell.
*as Will Anderson in The Cowboys, screenplay by Irving Ravetch, Harriet Frank Jr. and William Dale Jennings
