#WhyIWrite How I Got Started, and Why I'm Still Going

"The unexamined life is not worth living." ~ Socrates

"If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours." ~ Henry David Thoreau

I wrote my first story at nine. And I do mean wrote, as in putting one word after another on a piece of paper. However, I'd been making up stories since I was at least four. (I'm lucky in that I can still vividly recall those early years).

I was one of those kids who didn't get along with other kids. The neighborhood my siblings and I grew up in was not one populated by young couples with kids, but the few who did live on our street at some point made it abundantly clear that they didn't like me and didn't want to play with me. My brother was fine, but I was not. My suspicion is that, since I was younger, while they were the same age as my brother (he's almost two years my senior), they didn't want to play with me. Grade-school age kids are hierarchical in that way. So, I spent a lot of time on my own. Though I was alone, I can't say that I was lonely. In fact, I enjoyed it. Through those years, I created lots of friends, friends who I knew a great deal about. These imaginary friends were my first characters.

Yet, in those years (ages four-nine), it didn't look as if I was going to grow up to be much of anything. I was dyslexic, a condition that limited my ability to read and to write. The world of words was a minefield for me. My problem became so severe that I very nearly repeated the third grade because my reading and writing abilities were so stagnated. Fate thankfully, in the form of my mother, intervened.

The powers that be explained that I had two options: I could either repeat the third grade, or I could attend summer school. Well, my mother knew that I didn't want to do the former, and that if regular school hadn't helped me, then the latter likely wouldn't either. So, she came up with a compromise. If she could find a reading tutor, who could read with me at home, in an informal environment, then that would act as the stand in for summer school, and I'd be able to move on to fourth grade next year.

The tutor's name was Sister Rosemary (yes, she was a Catholic Nun). Each week, she came to the house and, rather than allowing me to flail when I came across a word I didn't know, she helped me with it as we read books together. By that summer's end, I'd graduated from reading Dr. Seuss and Mary Pope Osbourne to reading the children's novels of Roald Dahl.

It's fortunate that I improved. Had I not, it's doubtful that I ended up becoming a writer.

The first story I wrote was actually a class assignment given to us by my fourth grade teacher, Ms. Hale. We'd just finished reading, as a class, Roald Dahl's The Witches, and she gave us the assignment of writing and illustrating our own fairytale. Easily, this was my favorite school assignment ever. The one I wrote was called Merlin and the Magic Monster (though I didn't know the word, even at that age, I had an ear for alliteration). We went through the whole process of writing: brainstorming, first draft, second draft, final draft with illustrations in book form. Although, I'll admit it was hard for me when Ms. Hale, who acted as editor for all of us, went over my first draft with a red pen, coating it with chicken scratch, I cringed, but it did make it better.

Luck struck again when the next year, me and my whole class ended up getting Ms. Hale as our fifth grade teacher. Even then, she kept pushing us to write stories. Every so often, we'd come back from lunch and recess and there would be a "writing prompt" on the chalk board. Usually, it was a sentence fragment in need of completion, and it acted as our spring board into our stories. A few I recall include:

"SPLASH! I dropped the dinosaur DNA, and..."
"My mother never got so mad at me, until..."
"I was so excited that it was Friday because..."
"I didn't used to believe in magic pencils until..."

(That last one's my favorite).

And, of course, my reading in that time continued as well. I read several of my first "adult" novels in those years, including Frankenstein, Gulliver's Travels, Around the World in 80 Days, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, along with a lot of great children's books, Wind in the Willows, The Wizard of Oz, The Jungle Book, and The Giver.

In those two years, I discovered that I loved to write. Since I was also a shy kid with a lisp, reluctantly to talk to others, being able to coherently put my thoughts down on paper was a communication lifesaver. John Updike once said, "You write because you don't talk so well," and in my case that was certainly a factor.

However, something initially stopped me from thinking that writing would be my life as an adult: my memories as a dyslexic kid. I concluded that someone for whom words were once an adversary, a source of agony really, would never be able to be an adequate writer. Even though I liked it, I turned away from it. (Though, I'll admit, through middle school, I never cringed or moaned when were assigned a paper to do).

For several years--because I also had an aptitude for biology and mathematics, believe it or not--I thought I was going to become a herpetologist, a biologist who specifically studies reptiles and amphibians (think Steve Irwin, with a tan, in a suit).

That is, until I was fourteen.

In a previous essay, I talked about how I diverged into music (the dilettante musician). I learned both the trumpet and the upright bass and became equally skilled at both. Music got my creative side ignited again. This interest lead me to the local arts high school in St. Louis, Central VPA. But, it was there that reality set in. I realized that I couldn't hack it as a musician. I didn't have enough skill, confidence, or passion to pursue music in any fashion, as either a creator or just an ensemble player.

Concurrently to that realization, I started the first of two novels. I couldn't type then (didn't learn until I was a sophomore), so I wrote this story by hand, on loose leaf paper in a binder I carried with me. (Here's the kicker). I would work on it during school by sitting in the back of the class room in my Civics & Geography class--we had a teacher who didn't actually teach, he just gave us information, so it was impossibly to fail his class, unless you were a complete boob--doing a page or so a day. Eventually though, I hit a brick wall with that one (I couldn't figure out the end), so I abandoned it and started another (like a real writer). That second one took me four years to finish, but I did finish it.

By the time I reached Senior year--I had a great scholarship awaiting me at the University of Missouri-St. Louis--I had to make a choice: music or writing. And I made my choice.

Through my four years of college, I wrote. Not just essays for class, but short stories and poetry, all of which were terrible. The best of the worst ended up getting published in the University's humor magazine, Brain Stew, to which I regularly contributed for the last three years of my college career. (Incidentally, I never did manage to get published in any of the other magazines UMSL had available, like Litmag, which I suppose gave the impression that if I ever did get published, I'd never be a highbrow author). This was my real apprenticeship. Alongside that, I took creative writing courses. While I took those, I confirmed a theory Ray Bradbury long held and preached to would-be writers: "You can't learn to write in college. You learn to write by writing."

All though that time, I was also submitting work to agents, magazines, and editors at the professional level. Everything I sent out got rejected. But, I kept writing, despite that. Something--perhaps it was gusto for writing, perhaps it was arrogance, perhaps it was a desire to prove the rejections wrong that I was publishable, or maybe even a combination of all three--kept me writing no matter what.

That isn't to say I didn't reel from it as well. There were times when I got so depressed that I couldn't write. In fact, there were times I could barely even function. I could hear the clock ticking. I could sense time passing. Every rejection was a chunk of effort lost. But, I persisted.

The regular bylines in Brain Stew helped in those years, as did three other events. As a college sophomore, I won second place in an essay contest (and a check for $200 with it). My senior year, I took my last creative writing course with the same with whom professor I took my first course. He'd read my earliest stories, which were crap in prose form, and he noted that I'd indeed improved, dramatically. Finally, I'd also taken a course in journalism--just to dip my toe into the world of non-fiction writing--and the final piece we wrote for that class had to be an in-depth feature article, in the style of those published in magazines like Time. I did one on the subject of Homelessness in the City, and interwove it with the experiences of a close friend of mine who'd been homeless for a year. In his assessment of the piece, my instructor noted, "this is worth publishing in some way at some point."

When I graduated, I seriously thought things were looking up. But that demon depression overtook me again after another series of rejections, and I lost all confidence. I felt as if I was a vehicle, stuck in a muddy quagmire, spinning all my wheels and making no progress in any direction. I didn't know what I was doing wrong, so I didn't know what I could do to improve any further. I stopped writing, completely, for a year. I worked a blue-collar job as a Deli Clerk in a Grocery Store during that time (it was the only sort of job a moron with a degree in English could get), and I tried to abandon my dream of being a writer. But I couldn't.

I still had this urge to keep writing. There were things I wanted to say, stories I wanted to tell, characters I still wanted to share with the world. So, I started again, but I started again with a complete change in attitude. I decided that it didn't matter if I ever got published or not. I was going to keep doing this for myself, regardless, because I literally couldn't imagine my life without it. That aside, I still wanted to get better on the craft level for my own satisfaction.

So, earlier this year, I did three things. One, I enrolled in a writing class at St. Louis Community College, to get be back both into a literary milieu and to get me writing again. Two, I shot-gunned applications to all four of the SF fiction writing workshops I knew of (Clarion, Clarion West, Odyssey, and on the recommendation of Kij Johnson, the Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction's (CSSF) Writing Workshop), in the hopes of attending one. And three, I started my third novel (partly because I wanted to write novels, and partly to act as a psychological safety net in case I didn't get in to any of the workshops). What I was looking for was motivation and a feedback loop. I needed the two cents of other far more knowledgeable than me in the craft, who respected what I was doing, to help guide me that last league further to good quality.

It was in April of this year that all those things together.

My Community College class concluded. I'd received two polite rejections from Clarion and Clarion West. The novel kept me afloat and writing. Then, I received an email from one Chris McKitterick. Chris is the one in charge of the CSSF Writing Workshop. In addition to the workshop application, I'd also sent him a story I'd managed to squeeze out before my slump. In he email, he went through all the things that he liked about it and made a few suggestions about what he thought I could do to improve its quality, the level of feedback for which I'd been searching. Finally, near the end of the email, he wrote the phrase, "Regardless, if you're interested, you're in!"

To use an apt cliché, my heart leapt. This was the first time that my writing-centric acceptance.

Now, I would like to write here that I immediately replied back to accept, but the truth is a little more complicated. I still hadn't heard back from Odyssey, so I told Chris it would have to be a maybe until I got an answer. Eventually, I did. The nice woman in charge of Odyssey said that I showed promise, but I she couldn't give me a place. However, she did short list me--meaning that if a spot opened up because someone else dropped out, I could get it.

That didn't happen.

So, once that expected reply came in, I quickly contacted Chris and enthusiastically--or as enthusiastically as one can in an email--accepted his invitation.

There was just one problem. The workshop was Short Fiction focused. And I had only two finished short stories that I would've even considered to let anyone look at. Thus, I put aside my novel, finished one more story, and submitted my application.

The experience at CSSF is worthy of its own essay, so I won't go into it here, so I'll summarize it with an anecdote that reflects my experience.

A colleague I met at CSSF, Kathy Kitts (whose book you should check out), a veteran of the Workshop regaled me of the tale of a fellow writer who'd come to the workshop a few years back. He'd come from the separate workshop devoted to novel writing. One day, while the short fiction people were convening at the same time as the novel writers in separate parts of the same building, the short fiction writers heard this sudden slam of a door banging against the side of a wall as it was forcefully flung open. This drew everyone's attention, including hers, and they saw this writer tromping out of the room where the novel workshoppers met.

This poor fellow's posture and demeanor suggested frustration, so Kathy shouted, "What's wrong? Where are you going?" (She feared that maybe he'd just undergone a particularly bad critique session that left him discouraged).

The guy shouted, "I'm going to demand my tuition money back for my MFA!"

In two weeks, he'd learned more about writing from this program than he had in two years at a university. And that's how it was for me. In two weeks I learned more from that program, in sheer story craft and style, than I had in four years as an undergraduate.

Now, four months removed from that, I'm back to work at my novel (I'm 60k into it at the time of this essay's composition). I have a blog that some people--apparently--are reading, and I recently received news that an article I submitted (in exchange for money), will soon be published by Tor.com--thanks to the essays I've written on here.

In short. I write because I love it. I can't picture myself being alive an NOT doing it