Writing, Seriously

Last year, I decided to get serious about writing.

I’ve mentioned this before. I tell people about this. I’ve smushed this into my personal narrative. In 2023, at age 39, I decided to “get serious” about writing.

“When did you start writing?” / “What book made you want to be a writer?” / “Why did you start writing?”

People ask writers these questions. I don’t have answers. I’ve been writing since I could write. My grandma wrote hymns and had poems published in the local paper. I’ve kept a journal since third grade (in which I wrote that I wanted to be a scribe when I grew up).

In elementary school, I continually won the “young authors” contest. In middle and high school, my teachers always picked my pieces to read to the class. In college, I had a poem published in an online literary magazine.

Somehow, I stopped. I didn’t stop writing; I stopped feeling like a writer. I still wrote in journals, and I have scraps of stories and failed NaNoWriMo attempts I don’t even remember typing up littered on hard drives and cloud storage. When I lived in NYC at age 29, I spent many evenings in my living room/office/hallway, finally composing 50,000 words with my new kitten for company. After countless failures, I finally “won” NaNoWriMo. I remember finishing the novel in the car after I moved back to Michigan.

The novel now lives in a 3-ring binder in my garage. I tried revising it once, but I decided there wasn’t enough gold there worth refining. Was this pyrite of a novel what kept me from writing much for the next several years? Or was it growing my software engineering career and starting a family?

In 2018, I tried NaNoWriMo again. I had no plan or idea--I simply wanted to write. With a vague concept in my mind, the 10,000 words flew out of my fingertips. Then, I realized I had no idea where the story was going. I felt like the writers of LOST must have, towards the end: a myriad of mysteries with no conclusion. Despite the wandering plot, I would love to revisit those characters someday.

Sometime after the pandemic, when my youngest child finally reached the age where I felt like I could breathe again, I started feeling restless. Now, I don’t believe we’re even supposed to have just one thing that we do that suddenly makes life worth living. (If I did, it would be petting cats, not writing.) But I had all this creative energy, and as someone who’d always drawn pictures and written stories and made things, I didn’t know where to focus it.

I got really into knitting. I still dream of opening a yarn dyeing studio someday. I pondered getting into digital art but rarely picked up a stylus. I considered ways I could use my coding skills more creatively in a world where most apps and websites look like slight variations of each other. It wasn’t until one day in 2023 when I stood in the shower and realized the creative thing I should focus on wasn’t visual at all. It was something I’d been doing in pieces in the background the whole time: writing.

It took me several showers to remember this epiphany because I would get out of the shower and instantly forget. (I’ve since considered writing a short story about this: a character who figures out the meaning of life and fully understands their purpose, but only in the shower. I haven’t written it; feel free to take the idea and run with it.) Eventually, I trained my brain: when you wonder what creative thing you should be doing, the answer is writing. It’s always been writing. Write, you idiot.

Write.

Write what?

I wanted to write. I’ve always been drawn to science fiction and fantasy. I thought of the magical short stories I loved in high school and college by authors like Aimee Bender and Judy Bunditz and wondered: could I write short stories? I had so many novel beginnings that I knew would never go anywhere. Could some of them be short stories instead?

Someone had purchased The Long List Anthology Volume 3: More Stories From the Hugo Award Nomination List for me for Christmas a few years back. Despite being on my wish list, I hadn’t read it yet. I picked it up, intending to read the stories and ask myself: Why does this story work? What makes it good? Could I write a good story?

My favorite from the book is about an alien who gets in trouble at school because she wants to taste everything.

“I could do this,” I thought, reading the stories. I knew I’d need a lot of practice and, more importantly, ideas. I wanted to write a short story, but I didn’t know what to write about.

Until one day, the idea came to me. I like to picture ideas like butterflies and moths fluttering around, nearly impossible to catch. I finally had one, a moth, lovely and terrifying, and I put her in a jar. Later, I would transform her essence into words on a screen.

My second two ideas appeared when I had a fever. One was more of a caterpillar and needed coaxing to transform into a butterfly.

The other part of “getting serious about writing” I wanted to do in 2023 was find a writing community. I had one and only one plan for doing this: NaNoWriMo. I joined and, for the first time, attended local events. (This eventually led to me starting karate with my son.) I joined two Discord groups. I picked a novel idea from my archive of ideas and planned. I’m still working on this novel, but I wrote that 50,000 words. More importantly, I found other writers.

Around the same time, I contacted an editor and sent her two of my stories. She didn’t think I was a talentless hack.

I’ve written more stories, including flash fiction (prose less than 1000 words), and I’m incredibly proud of them. This past year, I’ve taken some intense feelings and made something beautiful.

Focusing on writing doesn’t mean I need to neglect my other hobbies. I still want to draw, knit, design websites, build apps, and contemplate doing voice-over work. But I know now that writing will always be there, waiting for me.