Trying to Be a Writer:

Growing up, I watched my mother try to be a writer. I followed her example:

¨ I sent a miserable set of thoughts and almost-poetry to Random House when I first graduated high school. They didn’t buy it. I got sidetracked.

¨ My senior (9^th) year in college, I took a fiction-writing class from Jerry Rosen, a published author. Everyone loved my short stories.

¨ I sent out a few and got rejections. I quit sending them out.

¨ In 1982, I wrote my first novel while my first baby napped. I went a step further than my mother had. I flew to a conference in NYC and had two agents ask me to send them the manuscript. One sent a form rejection; the other said he liked my writing, but this work had too many characters. I put it in a box.

¨ In 2002, I wrote another book. I decided to try the agent who liked my writing and called to confirm mailing information. I was not prepared for him to answer the phone himself, but he did. He vaguely remembered my name and wanted to see the new book, as long as it wasn’t memoir. I assured him it was fiction and promised to send it right away. When I looked at it, it was memoir. My hasty attempt to fictionalize it was a failure. When I finally wrote to apologize it was too late. I’d been grossly unprofessional and I lost that contact.

¨ My confidence in myself as a writer withered. I put it aside and fell blindly in love. He said he supported my quitting teaching and writing full time.

2003

¨ It took months to convince everyone that my being home did not mean I was there to chauffeur, run errands, etc.

¨ I took classes on self-employment and writing.

¨ My kind-of memoir filled in some background for the mother in a novel.

¨ When the novel was finished, I had friends and relatives give me feedback to polish it. Then I started pitching it to agents and publishers found in Writer’s Market and Jeff Herman’s Writer’s Guide.

¨ Rejections piled up. No one asked for more than a few pages.

¨ The local bookstore had a critique group. With low expectations, I took a few chapters to read. They said I’d started in the wrong place; they were right. It was a talented group, dedicated to helping each other improve and publish. After several false starts, I found the beginning that worked for me and for my critical audience. I worked on my Running Away full time.

¨ Writing had become my business, even if I wasn’t making money yet.

Trying to be a writer is a hobby; being a writer is a business.