Writing is a wild thing
Writing is a wild thing. When it comes running, I’m not always sure who’s calling whom.
I never dreamed of being a writer and decades later, as I’m sifting through my memory, I’m trying to make sense of why it’s taken me so long to realise I was one.
The role-models, if you could call them that, possibly weren’t all that enticing, unless you were after a tragic life, riddled with misery and self-medication. Since the Internet wasn’t even a blink in anyone’s mind, there were not all that many other options either.
Yet I earned my first money publishing short stories in a teenage magazine. One of them got plagiarised. Instead of being flattered, I was outraged, learned the wrong lesson and stopped publishing stories for a while.
Life happened, the Internet arrived and somewhere in between changing jobs and moving around, I bumped into this wild thing again and found that I wanted to run with it.
Somewhere along the line, Amazon outraged the world of publishing, much to the delight of aspiring writers like myself. If I could talk to that younger version of myself who ‘just wanted to try it’, I’d likely quote Yoda: ‘Do, or do not, there is no try.’
Reader, I tried it. Not wholeheartedly, but curiously. After putting out a book, I chased that wild thing with more conviction. I wrote before going to work, I wrote during the weekend. I wrote while on holiday and often composed stories in my head while doing other things. The latter, I discovered, was a surefire way to get injured.
It took a life change to consider that the wild thing could be more than a hobby. When my husband’s job sent us across the ocean, I decided to give that wild thing a chance. I’d write a book, find an agent and get published. I took courses, joined groups, started groups and wrote like hell. I pitched stories to agents and sometimes publishers, and very quickly discovered that while I was figuring things out, the queue got terribly long and even if I made it to the front, there were no promises, no guarantees.
Why was I doing this again?
The answer was simple and sobering. If someone believed my writing was good enough, then I’d be able to chase that wild thing without feeling like a liar. While it did keep me away from the world, it also brought me closer to myself than anything else I ever did. I wanted it, I needed it. I had to have it.
I’d daydream about finding an agent or a publisher who’d love my stories as much as I did. It would change everything. I could abandon the guilt and just write full-time.
‘Hello,’ said the wild thing. ‘What exactly are we doing now?’
Actually, yes, I kind of was writing full-time, not thanks to any large advance or contract but because of my wonderful husband. He’s known about the wild thing since the day we met and has been nothing but supportive of all my attempts to chase it. So okay, maybe having an agent or a publisher wouldn’t change that much, but I would feel better having that stamp of approval, the confirmation that my work is worthy of the dead trees it would be printed on. I just needed to find that one person who could give it.
Long story short, I did find that person and it turned out to be me. I returned to self-publishing, no longer as a fallback option, but as my main choice. And yes, the wild thing still runs with me. There are challenges, sure, but as long as we’re moving, there’s no looking back.