A
little over three years ago I was pushing my daughter on a swing at
the park. A friend was chatting with me and I happened to mention a
quote I’d always been drawn to. In that moment, truth hit me like
the swing barreling toward me on rebound. Life became clear. I was
meant to be a writer.
Nothing
could
be more simple, or more difficult. Difficult because to trust
children
we
must first learn to trust
ourselves,
and most of us were taught as children
that
we could not be trusted. How Children
Learn
(1967) ~John Holt "How Children
Learn"
I’d
like to say the first time I read it, it resonated with me in the
moment but the truth is it became an earworm for me over several
years. While I thought I knew what trusting myself meant, and how
that could apply to trusting my children, in reality, the very
essence of the quote hadn’t come to fruition yet. The concept was
so simple, but in order to get there I had to do some discovery
within myself.
How
could I trust I could be good enough? How could I trust that I’d
have value in something meaningful to say? Who cared about these four
characters I had secretly living in my head? I hadn’t finished
college, and you had to have education with a piece of paper at the
finish line to be determined good enough, right?
In
just a moment I realized I’d let the fear and distrust from others
define whether I could follow everything in my being telling me who I
was meant to be. I can’t even say there were these huge instances
that tore my dream down. The fears were little comments. They were
little doubts over time that shaped my path and told me to keep
turning down a safer one even if my heart sung for something
different.
So
that night I took my yoga pants wearing behind home with a four year
old and eight year old in tow, and decided I was going to be a
writer.
The
problem of course was that I had no idea how to be a writer, other
than visions of characters living out fantastical events, some brief
fanfiction practice, and some posts on social media. So I tried to
remember books I’d read about writing long before when I’d dared
be brave enough, and I read some more books. I outlined, I
storyboarded, I made timelines and notes. I set a first draft start
date, and began writing.
March
1st, 2014
At
first I was soaring through the project. My story was going to be
awesome and I was sure I’d have friends and family and even
strangers turning pages and wanting to get to know more. And then I
joined a critique group and realized I had a long way to go to make
this story worth reading.
I
wrote a lot more. I started over. More than once, trying to shape
this wild and complicated story into something similar to a novel and
not just a neverending brain dump of everything I’d ever imagined
my characters doing. I tried my hand at other stories, and even
published some short and fun young romance I titled Missed
Kisses.
Throughout
the process, I gave up. Often. I’d take months attempting to talk
myself back into the idea that I wanted this, and that there was a
reason these characters had been hanging around for so long. I faced
the idea of failure. I cried. I fretted people that knew me would
look into the mirror I kept facing and realize maybe I didn’t have
all the answers. That I didn’t know what I was doing. That they’d
hate my beloved characters and would use them to judge me personally.
The
same fears that had kept me from writing for years before began to
keep me from finishing.
You’re
not a writer.
Your
interests are juvenile and a waste of time.
You’re
not good enough.
You
can’t be trusted.
You’re
not worth this endeavor.
These
fears almost paralyzed me. I didn’t know how to push past all of my
insecurities when I felt weighed already from so many challenges.
Each time I tried to climb back up our family was hit with another
hardship, and I wondered if the universe was telling me this wasn’t
meant to be.
This
last attempt- which I don’t even think was much different from the
rest, but it ended up being the final one- came to fruition because
life hit me with how short it was once again. My little sister was
thirty-seven with two young kids. She knew my characters well and
even chose my lead character’s muse for me many years before.
(Message
me, because I’m not admitting that tidbit on public media because
who am I kidding it’s turned into a fangirl crush at this point.
One I happily shared with her.)
One
December day shortly after her death the second realization came,
she’d never see me finish.
So
on January 1st, I started my manuscript over. I fine-tuned the story
for who-knows-what-number-of-times. I kept some things, added some
things, trashbinned some others.
To
make it more exciting, my computer lost my manuscript for a few days.
My brain had been struggling to keep up on important things like
back-ups. I felt embarrassed, and like I’d been hit with a
sledgehammer of truth that maybe I just couldn’t manage this.
Then,
a friend kindly recovered my book for me, including making automatic
backing up effortless, but through the process my repetitive stress
injuries in my wrists got so bad I could barely type.
About
this time a friend approached me about a writing workshop she
believed in, Renegade
Writer’s Group. My friend T had witnessed my challenges I’d
been trying to overcome, and she graciously helped me get into the
class. Thirty days of writing 1,000 words everyday, which would just
about put me at the end of my first novel.
Since
I couldn’t type, I began handwriting everyday, then would transfer
with a speech to text program called Dragon
Naturally Speaking. There were several bumps in this process,
besides, you know writing for several hours a day, but I was getting
the word-counts in spite of them. Somehow, with the combination of
writing in my sister’s memory, committing to daily word counts that
I shared with others, doing this alongside other women writers, and
giving myself the permission to suck I managed to push through each
moment of doubt, each little voice that said how exposed this would
make me.
This
was at least thirty times I
just made that number up
more
challenging than I could have ever imagined, and really this is just
the start. There’s a list of people, blog posts, writing groups,
friends, family, books, along with healed and broken bits of myself
that contributed to the accomplishment. No matter what comes of this
manuscript, whether people love it, or hate it, or never even read
it,
I
accomplished a dream.
A big one, that took me thousands of hours and touched every area of
my life.
I’m overcoming fears. And maybe I always have, and I’ve just yet to recognize my worth.
There will be a thousand kisses in a lifetime but only a handful trapped forever in your heart. This Valentine's day, join The Story of a Kiss anthology as we take you into the lives of thirteen couples. From a very first kiss of a high-school prom queen, to a kiss that travels the width of time. Kisses of redemption, heartache, discovery, and so much more.
Thirteen authors.
Thirteen kisses you'll never forget.
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Taylor Sullivan- Never Regret
At twenty-four, Margaret Andrews is still a virgin and sick of it. After a year on the top dating site in America, and a late night episode of HUNG on HBO, she's decided to take matters into her own hands and hires a professional. 
