The other day, I asked my Twitter followers if they had any interest in hearing my “origin story,” or all my failures on the road to becoming a (nearly) full-time writer at 35. I’d been mulling over this for a while, but wondered it it was just too navel-gazing to actually publish. That said, if you’re here, you’ve opted into my narcissistic delusions, so enjoy!
As soon as I learned what writing was, I wanted to do it. From preschool age, I always had a story in my mind—someone I was pretending to be, a scenario I was pretending to experience—and I couldn’t imagine how great it would feel to turn those things into stories, let alone books. I’m not sure how well a book called The Princess Fairy Veterinarian Dog would have sold, but I had dreams.
I didn’t learn how to actually put pencil to paper until I was about six. My first grade teacher allowed us thirty minutes of free journaling time every day. One day, I simply didn’t want to stop when the other kids stopped. I asked my teacher if I could keep writing, mostly as a Hail Mary because I didn’t think she would say yes. But she did. She allowed me to write, for what turned out to be hours, slowly filling my marble notebook with stories, thoughts and drawings. I did that for the rest of the day, until school was over. That was when I knew that this wasn’t just something I enjoyed. This was what I was meant to do.
From that point on, I wrote basically nonstop. I would staple paper together and fashion elaborate and often melodramatic stories, usually about gigantic sibling groups of orphans fashioning themselves new homes in the wilderness, or little pauper girls in Victorian England discovering they were secretly princesses. My parents were proud of me, but probably overwhelmed by the volume of work with which I presented them. It felt almost like a challenge for me—it was great to have my parents read my work, but almost preferable to have them reach their limit and to still have a backlog of stories.
I suffered socially, and it might have been because I had such a vivid imagination and I freaked other kids out with my tales of dragons living in my basement (my mother corroborated this story, which prompted a girl in my class to “swear on the lives of everyone at her synagogue” that I had a real dragon. I went to bed terrified that I had inadvertently killed hundreds of Jews.) It also could have been the other way around—that I burrowed deeper into my imaginary world because I had a hard time reading social cues. Either way, writing was something I did primarily at home, by myself. I’m sure my parents sometimes worried about how I didn’t have any other interests—I refused to partake in any sports, especially because I was unathletic, and other kids would pick on me for what they believed was purposeful sabotage of our kickball game. But my parents encouraged me to keep writing anyway.
My writing was frequently a topic at parent-teacher conferences, although not always for the better. While my first grade teacher encouraged my writing, even to the detriment of her overall lesson plan, other teachers were less charitable. My second grade teacher screamed at me—in a way that no teacher could get away with today—because I was too busy thinking about my next story to correctly answer her question about the capital of New York (It’s apparently not New York City, which is incredibly dumb!) In third grade, my teacher called my parents in to let them know she caught me writing a play during what was supposed to be a math lesson. In fourth grade, I was admonished for writing a story about the Oregon Trail that involved the slow death by dysentery, of a character named after a classmate (she was completely fine with it, by the way.) My parents never punished me for these missteps, because I think they were just as confident as I was that I had found my passion.
But no passion is complete without some obstacles. My middle school had a big writing contest—think The Grammies for five paragraph essays called, “All About My Summer In Delaware With My Cousins.” This wasn’t one of those kiddie contests where everyone got a participation trophy. There was a whole ceremony, with excerpts of the best pieces read aloud to the school, and coveted first prize plaques. I know this doesn’t sound like a big deal, but potentially relevant is the fact that I was abysmal at anything else for which you could earn an award. Like I said before, I was terrible at sports (picked last in gym so often that the teachers started letting me be the team captain so I wouldn’t be humiliated) and only so-so at theater and art. Writing was the only thing where a gold medal, or some gold medal adjacent plaque, was within reach.
I entered the writing contest with a piece I wrote about a Victorian child living in a sprawling, lonely mansion with her emotionally distant parents, who discovered she had a twin who died in infancy. It was a pretty morbid, creepy story. But this was during my Goth era, and I was serving Tim Burton meets Charles Dickens realness everywhere I went. The day before the writing awards, my parents pulled me aside to let me know that I had won first prize for the short fiction category. Apparently the school notified the parents of the winners ahead of time so they they could attend the ceremony, which parents didn’t typically attend.
I was overjoyed, but not surprised. Obviously, I won. I was great at this! I showed up to the writing awards, smiling smugly as I looked at all the other hapless contestants onstage, especially these boys who co-wrote some dumb story about going ice fishing. Real compelling stuff! I thought to myself. Finally, the first prize for short fiction was officially announced and I practiced my best “surprised” face, when much to my horror, the award went to the ice fishing kids. I had “won”… if “honorable mention” counts as winning.
This did not count as winning to me. I was furious. My parents were also thrown for a loop, and immediately after the ceremony they spoke with the teacher who had informed them of the “win.”
“I’m so sorry for the mixup,” she said. “I still consider an honorable mention to be winning.”
“It’s winning if you’re a loser,” I found myself saying.
“You are not a loser,” the teacher said. “You are very talented. When we read your story, we could tell just how much you love writing. But Ice Fishing with Grandpa was more…well, it was more relatable. If you want a better shot next year, I recommend you write what you know. Something other kids can relate to.”
“I think I’ve got it,” I said. Then I said something my parents still remind me about to this day: “So what you’re telling me is I suck.”
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