My Writing Story

My earliest memory as a writer comes when I’m about eight years old. We were given an assignment: take an ordinary day in our lives and add something creative to it. All right! So I did.

I wrote about being outside, playing in the fields that were behind our then apartment. I remember writing about looking up at the sky, examining a leaf, and my dad shouting down to me that the Tigers had just won the World Series (actually, they’d won it about two years earlier). I remember writing that I was unimpressed, as I actually didn’t like baseball too much. From there, I’m pretty sure I added a crazy story about being lost in the fields and coming across a group of gnomes or something like that. There wasn’t much of a plot or good characterization to the story—being eight, I think I was just spilling words onto a page—but I remember having fun as I put it together. I handed it in, delighted with my efforts and somewhat proud of what I had produced.

What did my third-grade teacher write back on my paper?

“This is too fiction.”

Even then, I knew she was batshit insane. How can fiction be too fictitious!? Suffice it to say, I never looked toward her again as an arbiter of good storytelling.

But I got the writing bug, and I’d jot down small stories, only a few lines here and there, when I wasn’t busy at school, reading at home, or playing NES. I truly enjoyed it, but I think the teacher’s admonition stayed with me—I didn’t share my writings. The only time I did was when my family moved to Mexico, and I wrote about being sad at the idea of leaving my best friend at the time. I showed it to my mom and dad, who seemed genuinely impressed by my literary skills, but didn’t take the not-so-veiled hint that I didn’t want to move to Mexico.

By the time I landed back in Saline schools in eighth grade, I was still writing. This time, I was missing Mexico and wrote my heart out about it—mostly in the form of sappy poems and short stories about my friends there. In my English class, I had a student teacher from the University of Michigan take a shine to my writings—he’d read them aloud in class, prefacing it that I wished to remain anonymous. I remember one time he brought in an English-major friend of his—when she asked who in the class loved to write, my student teacher gestured in my direction, giving me an encouraging smile that faded when I didn’t budge to raise my hand. I hated school, I hated Saline, and I was not going to tell my classmates that I was the one who’d written the poems and stories. I was afraid that, once they found out I had written them, praise would turn into ridicule and I’d be more alienated than I already felt. Thanks, Mr. Nice Student Teacher, I know you were only trying to encourage my interests, but not in that environment. No way, no how.

The pattern continued. In my senior year, my English teacher loved my writing and would ask to, again, read aloud what I had written. I still wished to remain anonymous, which frustrated the hell out of her, but she had to respect my wishes. I remember a couple of times my classmates pointing gleefully to a guy who was known as a writer, telling him he’d written a good story and slapping his back. But he’d just shake his head with a look that said, “That’s not me, but I wish it were.” I’d just sit there and watch, not really caring that he got the accolades; the person who was giving out the grades knew it was me, and that’s all that really mattered at that point.

My teacher pulled her trump card, though, by awarding me the English award that year—I had to be at the ceremony as I was on the highest honor roll list and was receiving a scholarship from a local source. In her intro to the award, my teacher lavished praise, complimented my writing, encouraged me to keep writing, and knew that I would find publishing success. The entire intro, I was idly wondering who it was, not truly paying attention. Then my name was spoken. I remember being stunned as my parents turned to me, bursting with pride. I stumbled up to the stage, burning with something halfway between pride and shame—as nice as it was, I didn’t want this. I never wanted to be exposed to my classmates. The times I had been, even accidentally, were always followed by ridicule in some way or another. Luckily it was the end of the year—I didn’t have to suffer too much.

In college, I continued to write, and I continued to not share for a while. I forced myself to, though, by taking creative writing classes and trying to push past my comfort zone. In my freshman year, I tried to publish one of my novels. I submitted poems and short stories, always under a pseudonym, to magazines and other formats. I even started a website where I posted my own stuff and accepted submissions (and people actually took my submission guidelines seriously!). I was having fun with the written letter, and I was having fun interacting with people who didn’t care who I was—I apparently wrote well, and that was that.

Then, along with grad school, the real world hit. There wasn’t time for creative writing anymore. And it’s been like that for a long while. In the meantime, I’ve felt a growing hesitancy about my creative writing, and sometimes I still feel like that eight-year-old girl whose writing was first sniffed at by a Saline teacher—but this time the girl didn’t continue writing, at least not creatively.

The blog and my extensive reading have been a way for me to remain in the world of writing and books—I say that the blog writing keeps me on my toes, and I say that the reading I do is to explore the ways in which I would like to write. Both things are true. I’ve also had some writing recently published under my real name—it’s not fiction, but having the courage to send something out into the wider world was a big step for me. I also write for a living (well, mostly). But I’m missing the last piece of the puzzle—actually sitting down to write, be it a short story or a novel.

So I’m making myself do it. How? By taking a fiction writing class that was a Christmas gift from IP. And it starts this week.

Um. Gulp.

It’s time to jump, and it’s time to stop being afraid of what happens when I put pen to paper. It’s going to be rough for a bit—after all, I’m rusty, and the words may come out stilted and awkward at first. But maybe, just maybe, after some work and feedback, I’ll begin to feel more confident in my abilities. And then maybe, just maybe, I’ll put together something that I’m proud of and want to show to the rest of world—or make the noble effort to show it to the rest of the world, since getting published is no easy task.

Whatever the case, getting myself to write is the first step. And I’m taking it.

Wish me luck.