Writing Journey 3 – The Next Step in My Writing Journey

“Long patience and application saturated with your heart’s blood—you will either write or you will not—and the only way to find out whether you will or not is to try.” —Jim Tully, Writer’s Digest

I’m not sure if you all are ready to keep following me down my writing road, but in case a few of you are still interested, here we go on the next step. Maybe we will take a pause after this one. I hadn’t realized what a long road it has been. I don’t know why I wouldn’t know that. It’s been many, many years since I did take up that first pen with the ridiculous idea that I, a farm kid, could actually string enough words together to make a story somebody else might want to read. Maybe it is good I was so young that I didn’t know how to doubt then. The doubts came later. So, perhaps doubts are more for kids when they turn into teenagers and even more when they reach the grown-up age.

What is the grown-up age? That can surely vary according to the kind of life this or that kid lives. Some unfortunate children may have to grow up too quickly. Other fortunate kids, like me, have loving parents, a good home even if it was a drafty farm house built around a log cabin, and best of all, a farm with lots of trees for me to wander around in and dream big dreams. It was good to have a dog to walk with me too. Good too, although I didn’t always think so at the time, that I always had to help out with chores and farm work. Learning to work in support of your family is no small gift.

Back to the growing up part. I had to do that more quickly than many girls my age. I got married before I graduated high school. I had a baby while I was still seventeen, not considered a grownup age at all. I see kids now who are still in school, seventeen or eighteen, and I think how young they look. How young they are.

I was that young too, but once you are a mother, you have to be a grownup. And I felt plenty old enough to be that when I married. When I first held my beautiful baby boy.

My baby didn’t know I was that young. My baby just needed someone to take care of him. Fortunately, his father, only a few years older than I was, wanted to be a grownup for him too. As fortunately, my mother was ready to help me be a good mother, although she wasn’t real happy when I didn’t wait long to have that next baby. My son was only 20 months old when my daughter was born. What a gift she was. And still is. My mother thought so too from the very beginning. She was the one, and not me, who cried when that sweet little girl started school and began the journey to being a grownup too.

You may be wondering what any of this has to do with my writing journey. Sometimes my fingers get going on a keyboard and write whatever they want. Well, the words are there in my head somewhere. I just don’t always realize they want to come out. But all that does matter to my writing. In spite of being a very young mother with two babies when I was nineteen, I never lost the desire to write. It was harder for sure to find minutes to write, but the dream was still strong inside me. So strong that I knew I needed to know more than I did about how to go about being a better writer and learning exactly how to go about finding a way to get my words out there for readers. As I said before, I knew no writers. I read writers’ books, but would have never considered approaching one of them with questions about how I could be like them. I was still very shy then.

Still, I could read and anything I saw about writing would almost light up in the printed words before my eyes. That’s how I spotted a little square ad in the back of a magazine that advertised the Famous Writers School. I don’t think that’s a thing anymore. Probably not for years, but then it looked like a beacon of hope for me. I filled out the information in that little square and sent it off right after I married. They wrote back that, at seventeen, I was too young to enroll in their correspondence school. I felt old enough. So I waited until after my daughter was born and I was the old age of nineteen and sent in the application again.

This time they said yes. This time I had to figure out a way to pay for the maybe foolish idea of taking a course in writing. This time a salesman came to my house to sign me up. Of course, he got lost and missed the driveway to my house which set off the road and instead ended up at my parents’ house about a mile on down the road. I had not told my parents I was daring such a brave move. The salesman at their door looking for me had to be quite a surprise to them since, you might remember from my last post, I was that closet writer who had never shared my writing dreams with my mother or father. But they did direct him back down the road to our house. By the time he came down our driveway that did not have gravel but was merely a succession of ledge rocks with field rocks added here and there, the salesman thought he had gotten to the end of the world. If the movie Deliverance had been out, he would have thought he was hearing banjos.

I had confessed to my husband about sending off the application and the salesman coming to my husband. He might have been a little surprised but was supportive of my dream. I signed up. We didn’t have the money for the course, but I was able to pay in installments, and I started babysitting for my sisters to have that extra money. Keeping four extra children along with my two wasn’t the best way to have time to write, but somehow I did.

I’ll share the next step soon.

Have you ever taken a step that might have seemed foolish to everyone but you?