So You Liked My Bio...

The only thing as constant in my life as my family has been books. Storytime was a nightly ritual in my childhood, that is, until I learned to read and my nightly picture books had been replaced by chapter books. According to my parents, I felt that it was taking too long to get through the books, a chapter or two each night, and took it upon myself to get through those books at a far more reasonable pace. Unfortunately, this also brought to an end the simple joy of having a story read to you.

 

One of my earliest memories was during quiet playtime as a young child – preschool or kindergarten age – I had no desire to take a nap and my dolls got played with ad nauseum. Eyeing the bookcase an idea took root: I would build a fort out of books. My mom and I would build forts in the living room often – all the blankets draped over chairs, anchored by dictionaries, study bibles, and whatever other substantial books we possessed – so I figured why not try it with my sizable collection of picture books.

 

Now, this was the only time in my life I had tried to stack books vertically, positioned upright: covers facing outward with each spine erect – my attempt to take advantage of the sheer size of children's books while failing to take into account the fact that children's books are not terribly thick and therefore fell over quite easily.

 

Realizing my initial plan would not work, I made some slight alterations. I ended up propping my book collection up against the quickly barren bookcase, with select titles placed in a row creating the fourth “wall” of my fort. I recall being quite proud of my accomplishment.

 

For years I read whatever was handed to me by my parents. I was a bit too young to possess the critical thinking skills to know if I would like a book by assessing its back-cover synopsis, though I was quite good at judging the cover (and as I got older the spine) art.

 

Never in my life had I considered where books came from. They had always existed in my little world. At our house. The library. My grandparent’s houses. School. To me, they were a standard feature of life.

 

I can still remember an elementary-aged playdate with one of my classmates and was shocked to find her home void of books and bookcases. It was the strangest thing I had ever seen, and if I’m being honest, I found it rather unsettling. I was sure that everyone had books, including the friend I was visiting because I had seen her reading at school which I was sure meant that she had all kinds of books at home.

 

It was also around this time in my life that I learned what an author was. An adult – typically an old adult – or dead person who wrote books. Most of the books my parents had given me were written by dead people, and the one time an author visited my elementary school she was far older than my mom.

 

Largely ignoring this new information I went about my life as normal.

 

In fifth grade I was handed a thick, arduous packet on how to correctly punctuate dialogue. My teacher claimed it was a critical life skill. At 11 years old I wasn’t convinced, though at 22 I now owe her greatly.

 

In sixth grade (or maybe it was seventh), I managed to beg and plead my way to my parents buying The Hunger Games for me at the annual Scholastic Book Fair (I still get excited over Scholastic Book Fairs as a soon-to-be graduated college student). Suzanne Collins, a woman who was very much so an adult (who also was older than my mom) and very much so not dead, changed my life with those three, now looking a bit worse for wear paperbacks.

 

What has started as an intrinsic desire to be just like the cool girls who were already steeped in the dystopian trend turned into a life-long love of literature. For the first time in my life, the book characters I was reading about had just as complex and messy feelings and lives as I did. I felt truly seen, which is really all any middle schooler wants anyway.

 

In ninth grade I was beyond grateful to be starting my high school career with Honors English. I knew I was good at English, my best friend was in class with me, and the teacher was the sweetest woman I had ever met. A recipe for success.

 

After our To Kill a Mockingbird unit came the dreaded short story unit. Three days a week for seventy-five minutes each I had to sit and listen to her reteach plot arcs, conflict types, and character sheets as she tried to set us up for success.

 

I was sure that a good 90% of what she had said was crazy. How could creative writing be truly creative if we had to put so much forethought into it? Choosing to ignore her, I let my eyes wander the classroom walls, reading every last poster I could see, so when my chaotic ADHD gaze landed on the words, “Writers are Readers” I had the initial reaction of “Yes! I’m a reader!” but ignored the other half of the phrase. I was a bookworm, not a writer, that was my best friend's thing.

 

After all the prep work had been deemed adequate, the assignment was given: write a story that was more than two pages in length, demonstrated a plot arc, and had some literary devices. The topic: Anything.

 

For days I wracked my brain, searching for some semblance of a plot, a premise, a character even, but came up empty-handed. I had all the creative freedom I could ever want but nothing to say.

 

It obviously was going to have a female main character because writing from a male perspective was far beyond the realm of my comprehension. I also knew it was going to be in the first-person present tense, if only because that was all I had ever written in middle school. There was also the fact that most of the classic YA books I had been reading were written in either that same tense or first-person past tense. Beyond those two relatively useless pieces of information I had nothing, so I started where anyone would start: My character woke up.

 

Within a matter of sentences a best friend appeared, and slowly it came to me. My teenage character would wake up, pick up her best friend in her car like in the Disney Channel Original Movies I had seen, and then drive off to high school together.

 

Then I was stuck again. I needed something to kickstart the action, and after much griping, groaning, and grimacing, it hit me: she was a secret princess! Of course, when I was writing this, I didn’t realize just how much it read like The Princess Diaries, but I was sure I had something great. She would travel to a small, fictional, European country, attend a boarding school just for royals, and fall helplessly in love with her personal guard.

 

Idea finally in hand, I morphed into a modern-day Alexander Hamilton. I spent every spare moment that I had outside of classes and theatre rehearsal with my fingertips pressed against the keyboard of my laptop. Seemingly everyday my dad would make a joke or two about me writing the “next great American novel,” and I would remind him that I wasn’t a writer. It was a homework assignment. I was just a girl having fun.

 

This lengthy and overly-ambitious plot eventually came to about 40,000 words. Fifty double-spaced pages, so thick that the stapler couldn’t go through them all so I had to paper-clip it together when I turned them in.

 

I graduate from university this spring and I still have it (because I’ve always been sentimental of my work, not because I was a writer), hand-annotated by my teacher. Little did I know that I would keep every draft of every manuscript I’ll ever work on – including the “novel” length edition of that first “short” story.

 

In that one assignment, I had accidentally stumbled upon a sense of kinsmanship with the words on that poster. In the quiet whispers of my heart, I had discovered that I wasn’t just a reader, but also a writer.

 

Of course, like in any good story, it’s never that simple.

 

My dad had told me that I should find a way to fund my passions, so to the high school freshman in me, that meant I needed a “real” major, a “practical” career. Something to pay the bills. Something to pay back my student loans. Something to help me avoid becoming the starving artist, or the grown adult living in their parent’s basement (though in this housing market and economy, I have no shame in my post-grad housing plans).

 

Regardless of my aptitude for words, publishing was an impossible industry to break into. No one would want to read what I wrote, and I would be broke and homeless if I pursued it…or, at least, that’s what I believed. There was also the fact that I wasn’t a writer, just a dallying hobbyist.

 

I put up dams, banishing any non-academic words from my keyboard and hopelessly searching for something to do with all my pent-up creativity.

 

I poured myself into hobbies like art classes, even though it’s more than obvious I won’t be the next da Vinci. I worked backstage in theatre productions doing hair and makeup. I spent hours watching YouTube tutorials on how to construct smokey and halo eyes, where to place contour, and the best way to apply lipstick. Any outlet that would satiate my creative urges without becoming all-consuming like that one “short” story and sentencing me to a life of financial instability.

 

After three years of being scared of the thing I loved, I finally stopped searching for a replacement. A decision that I wish I could say I had been brave enough to make on my own, but unfortunately I cannot.

 

My marvelous coworker, Ally, one summer day as I was punching out asked me, “Why not do it?” and as I explained my list of reasons and my fears to her, she laughed, before turning every last point on its head. “What if you do it, and become wildly successful? What if it’s everything you’ve ever imagined it could be and more?”

 

These were thoughts I had never even begun to entertain in my conflicted mind. I hadn’t contemplated the positive “what-ifs” to my dreams, only the negative.

 

In exchange for my denial, I threw myself into reading. I was a reader. I always had been a reader, I’m fairly certain I will always be a reader. For as long as I can remember I’ve possessed an awe and wonder at people who could spin stories out of thin air and bind them to reality with simply paper and ink. For years my role models have been people who could send me to countless worlds, just to bring me back with some new insight to reality. 

 

Books and their worlds keep me up at night…that and the fact that there’s something about the quiet of a sleeping house, the warmth of your comforter cradling you in its fluff, and the unspoken bond that is created between you and the book.  Knowing that as the hours progress from late night into early morning, neither of you will be disturbed. The satisfaction of not having to stop reading countless times because of conversations, meals, and chores – just pure bliss.

 

It was this bookish bliss that largely propelled me through undergrad. My stem friends complained incessantly about their classes and labs but always explained away their disdain with the promise of a decent paycheck upon graduation. My only complaints had to do with things like Paradise Lost, Tocqueville, many dead poets (not Shakespeare, though). All things considered I didn’t mind my readings since I’d much rather bore myself to tears over a book than do any sort of math. 

 

In my misguided freshman year, I joined the student newspaper to start accumulating bylines so my fiction could get published. Just to clarify, that is not how things work. Fiction and journalism could not be more separate.

 

Quickly I discovered that fact-based writing was dreadfully dull, even if I did learn a few valuable lessons in my short tenure. I’m not a journalist; trust me, I tried and while I did find a part of myself through reporting, it wasn’t enough to cause a career shift. I was not a newspaper writer.

 

Ultimately it was the people I met in the newsroom that kept me coming back. Our meetings were often derailed by passionate discussions about authors like Stephanie Garber and Leigh Bardugo as well as university budget cuts, rather than talks of AP style or actual journalism things.

 

What had been a standard piece of my calendar for three years, was rather quickly abandoned. At first it was unintentional. I had planned on going and being with my friends, but I had this novel — my senior capstone project — that I needed to write. That I had been procrastinating on. That I was terrified to start working on.

 

What if I had been wrong? What if I wasn’t a writer? What if I had just wasted three years and thousands of dollars on the wrong thing?

 

Slowly, carefully, I coax my way into a rhythm.

 

Each morning I would go and sit at table 16 at my local Chick-fil-A, being reminded by Conrad to eat my lunch before it gets cold and to not work too hard for the three-ish hours I would spend there drumming out my daily word quota. I was doing what I had heard other writers do, and strangely enough it felt right. It came naturally to me: wakeup, write, do whatever I wanted with the rest of my day.

 

Surprisingly, I had indeed chosen correctly. The little girl who had commandeered her bedtime stories and tried to physically burrow into her books had become something far beyond her wildest dreams.

 

There’s a part of me that’s mad with myself for being so scared and stupid because I wasted four years that I could have spent learning and participating in young writers programs, but that is not a large part. Actually, it’s a rather small part.

 

Mostly, I’m grateful. I’m grateful for my mom who taught me how to read and write. I’m grateful for my fifth grade teacher who taught me how to use dialogue. I’m grateful for all the authors of my middle school days. I’m grateful for my high school English teacher and her open-ended assignment. I’m grateful for my dad with his unending support. I’m grateful for my professors and all the knowledge they passed on to me. And I’m grateful for me, finding the courage to go for it and do the thing, even if I did it scared.