If you’ve been reading about my writing beginnings and subsequent journey, you know that I had the writing dream as a preteen and that I just kept on dreaming through my teen years and even after I got married and had two babies. If you missed the earlier posts, the links are at the bottom of this post.
In my last post, I shared how I decided that I needed to find out more about being a writer and how to become a better writer. Maybe what I most wanted to find out is how to get my words in front of readers and maybe see a check come to me in the mail. Since all this was way back in the 1960s, that’s how everything came and went. In the mail. No electronic mail back then. No computers.
I got my text books and assignments from the correspondence writing course through the mail. I wrote the assignments and sent them back through the mail. Then I nervously waited to see what the instructors were going to say about what I had written. Most of the instructors were very kind and encouraging. One bashed one of my writing attempts because I had started every third sentence with a participle phrase. An example. “Walking to the garden, the sun burned down on the girl’s head.” That’s not something I really wrote but it could have been even though I sincerely hope my actual sentences weren’t quite that bad. There is a lot wrong with that sentence. For instance, the sun wasn’t walking to the garden. The girl was. If I wanted to use “walking to the garden” I should have at least had the girl as the subject of the sentence instead of the sun.
Okay, writing lesson over. But that is what the correspondence course did for me. It pointed out those awful things I was doing. The instructors marked up my assignments to show me a better way to write. I’ve always heard that you can’t teach someone to write fiction. Whether that is true or not, I don’t know. I do think that the desire to write stories is something that comes from within a writer. However, I do know for sure that you can teach a writer to write better and in a way that lets the reader absorb the story rather than just reading words. That’s the best way to read.
So, I learned to write better. I read what the instructors said and improved before I sent in the next assignment. Eventually the assignments were to write short pieces and stories. At last, I thought. I wrote a story about a child who had gone through a traumatic experience and didn’t talk. That might sound familiar to any of you who read The Song of Sourwood Mountain which just shows that ideas can bloom in new stories more than once.
Anyway, in the story, as best I remember since that has been a long time ago, the child’s adopted mother got the little girl a kitten. Since I like happy endings, the kitten helped the girl talk again. That is the only story I can remember writing for the course. The only reason I remember that story is because the instructor who critiqued that assignment told me I made him care about the little girl. He went on to say I should start submitting some of my stories. What a boost of encouragement that was and why I still remember the story.
I took his advice and began sending off things I had written. By mail, of course. In brown envelopes with return envelopes tucked in with the stories. The return envelopes came back to me along with my stories and polite little printed notes that whatever I had sent off didn’t suit their needs or something generic like that. Again, something I didn’t bother to remember. Sometimes I would put the stories in new envelopes and send them out again. I had high hopes. Perhaps too high for my beginning writing. I was wasting a lot of stamps. Eventually, I prescribed to a writing magazine, The Writer. The articles in that magazine helped me learn about submitting my writing and how to try some new markets. I looked for more realistic markets for my early writing as I realized I might not be ready to publish in national magazines.
Someone shared a HomeLife magazine with me. This was a magazine that many Baptist churches bought to have available for their members. It published personal life experience pieces. Plenty of those had to do with mothering. I had experience with that with my kids and my nieces and nephews I was babysitting. I started writing those types of pieces as well as continuing to write stories. And one day while I was rocking my nephew to sleep and his blonde hair was tickling my chin, I wrote the little poem, “Rocking.” Four short lines.
I sent it out to HomeLife, and in a few week, I got a white envelope in the mail with a check inside for three dollars along with a letter saying they planned to publish my poem in an upcoming edition and I would get copies of the magazine in the mail when that happened. Since I’d been sending things off and getting nothing by rejections, that little check for my poem was a big shot of encouragement. An editor somewhere had read my words and was willing to print them for others to read. That didn’t turn me into a poet. I continued to write those stories and personal experience pieces and eventually a few of them brought more white envelopes instead of return envelopes with rejection slips.
How I decided to write my first novel will be coming up in the next episode of my writing journey.
I sent out a newsletter a few weeks ago and asked readers to share a time when something special happened just when they needed an emotional or spiritual boost. I’m getting some great comments that I might share later here on One Writer’s Journal. Anyway, that was what happened for me when, years ago, that instructor liked my story and helped me keep believing I could write something that others might want to read.
Have you ever gotten a special encouragement boost like that?
Comments 1
yes, from family and friends