writing

22 Sep 2008 Comments Off

My Ark

I have always written, but I didn’t always know I was a writer. After all, lots of girls kept diaries, and we had a full staff at The Cardinal, my junior high school newspaper.

I became conscious of my need to write when, in high school, I moved from journalism and journaling to poetry. What were these strange verses that fell from my fingers to the page? I kept my poetry hidden, convinced it made me weird. I didn’t trust the creative process; it was like nothing else I’ve ever encountered.

Then I got married and stopped writing. At first, in love and crazy-happy, I hardly noticed. A year went by and no poems formed inside my head, demanding to be written.

I remember thinking, with a kind of relief, “That part of my life is over.” There was a little bit of sadness mixed in, which I ignored.

When our basement flooded, and my husband suggested I toss out all my soggy boxes of juvenilia, something in me said no. I threw away the ruined first diary, and all my drenched to pulp Cardinal clips, but most of the notebooks, somewhat protected by thick cardboard covers, survived.

I borrowed my mother’s typewriter and for the first time, revised my poetry. That shot me back into writing. It made me realize that, gee, I was a writer.

Pregnant with my first child, I wrote my first novel. The main character was, depending on the draft, a misunderstood poetess or a misunderstood songwriter. When I eventually sent my novel to a publisher, a kind editor wrote back, advising that their readers did not care for heroines in the arts.

My first rejection and not my last.

Meanwhile, I divorced, then got very busy raising two little boys as a single mom on a scant secretarial wage. I thought about going back to school, finishing my degree, obtaining a teaching certificate. I’d have every summer to write.

That was the plan, and, with digressions, I pretty much followed it. I won some prizes in college for my short stories, and published poems and stories in literary magazines. I fell in love (again) and married (again).

While my stories won admiration and cash, the novels were less satisfactory, squeezed between teaching duties, summer cottage visits and the demands of a family. I tried on genres like dresses: a literary novel, a mystery, a Regency, a romance.

With sky-high hopes, I sent the romance to a publisher. This editor wrote back to say that she’d liked my query far more than my manuscript. She advised I work on craft. Despite having two degrees in English, I didn’t have a clear idea of what she meant. The colleges I attended were big on symbol and literary style but post-modernly dismissive of plot and conflict.

I decided to take a year off teaching to write. I attended intensive craft workshops, and wrote every single day. I landed a job reviewing fiction for a magazine, and started this online journal you’re reading now.

Five years, three women’s fiction novels, and over a thousand internet posts later, the rejection letters kept coming. I switched from querying publishers to pitching to agents. I went back to teaching.

This time, my local college wanted me to teach creative writing. After a few years of telling young writers everything I knew about character, craft and publishing, I looked at my class notes and said “This is my book.”

And so teaching, the thing that I thought was blocking my writing success, came to be the thing that enabled me meet a cherished writing goal.

I self-published that book and use it in classrooms and the community. After I made my own dreams come true, I signed with an agent who loves my fiction. Now she handles the rejections, so I can get on with my real business: writing.

by cindy in My Memoirs Tags: writing