Plot Points of My Life

Several days ago, my friend Ally Carter posted about the moment she decided to become a writer. This is a question writers get a lot, and we all seem to have some sort of pithy answer to it, most often involving some variation of “I was always writing stories…”

Well, I was. When I was in second and third grade, and one of our weekly homework assignments was to write sentences including our vocabulary words, I wrote stories instead. I filled an entire book full of vocabulerific stories about a girl named Susie. Later, I used spiral bound notebooks to write more “books.” (Most of these were never finished, and if they were, they were very short.) One time in middle school, I pretended to be sick (sorry, Mom) for a few days in order to stay home and write the beginning of a book on my DOS Word Perfect about a teenager whose family’s exchange student steals her heart. In high school, I plotted out several romance novels, and a big epic fantasy, and wrote a bunch of short stories. In college, I wrote more short stories, a bunch of fanfic, and the beginning of a contemporary romance novel which completely derailed due to a romantic comedy being released that summer with the exact same plotline. Big sigh.

Unlike Ally, when I was a child I didn’t realize that there was a chance that I couldn’t be a writer. No, no, that kind of discouragement came in college. In college, I was taught that unless I wanted to win a Pulitzer or something, I shouldn’t write fiction. I dated boys who thought it would be better if I stopped writing about sex and started writing something more innocuous to their political aspirations: children’s books, perhaps?

These relationships ended badly. They’d end much worse if I knew those wankers now.

So I had always been writing, always assumed that writing a novel and getting it published would be something I’d end up doing someday… until I got to college, and realized how hard it was to actually write a book worthy of publication, how few people managed it, and how many fewer actually turned it into a living. If it was so hard, and even if I managed it, would be worthless unless I was Salman Rushdie or similar, then it probably wasn’t somethign I should do. I should think of something else.

I spent a lot of time thinking of something else. I spent so much time doing that, that eventually I earned a degree in Geology. But I was no scientist. I was no forest ranger. And, much to the dismay of my school’s narrow-minded career counseling services, I was no consultant, I-banker, or law-school applicant. Junior year, I took a class called Wilderness in the North American Imagination, which is an incredible experience and one of the top three classes I took at Yale. One of our major projects for the class involved looking over texts in the rare book library about the creation of Yellowstone National Park, and using those original sources to write a paper about the development of the U.S. park system. Included in the files were many letters from early visitors and surveyors with the USGS in the park.

I failed to write a term paper. Instead, I wrote an epistolary novella from the point of view of the correspondant to whom those letters were addressed. She was a well-to-do young Englishwoman, appalled that her little brother, the painter, had gone gallavanting off to the American West to live in a tent and make art of bubbling mud pots and geysers. But he slowly seduces her with images of the gorgeous landscape and description of the freedom to be found in the American wilderness, and eventually, she decides to look for herself. It was a mystery and a romance and it included all the relevant factual info about the creation of the park service. The instructor gave me an A+ and wrote “If I could write like you, I’d be a historical novelist.”

A year later I was whining to my new boyfriend (who I would later call Sailor Boy) that I didn’t know what to do with my life. I gave him my paper to read. He read it while I sat there, and then he said to me, “I don’t know why you’re pretending you want to be anything other than a writer.”

The statement was true on such a fundamental level that I was struck speechless. I had been pretending. But I would stop. The next semester, I took my first creative writing course. It was a disaster, but I’ve spoken of that before. The point was that I wasn’t going to pretend anymore. I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be the kind of writer I wanted to be, and I wasn’t going to apologize for it.

Within a year, I’d written my first 60k category romance manuscript and joined RWA. I’d gotten a steady gig at my newspaper and written my first cover story. At the time, this process seemed to take forever, but now I know that writing gestates slowly. One year is not so bad. (This is the kind of maturity that develops between 22 and 27.)

That moment on the couch with Sailor Boy (that couch has a starring role in Secret Society Girl, by the way) was one of the plot points of my life. It was the moment I decided, irrevocably, that I was kidding myself if I said I wanted to be anything else but a writer.

This day last year was another plot point. I signed a contract with my agent. She began submitting the manuscript. Within a week, I’d have a two book deal, and nothing would ever be the same again.

But it woudnl’t have been possible without that moment on the couch in my boyfriend’s dorm room when I decided that, come what may, I was going to be a writer.