I spent a solid couple years not creating, only consuming, and my life felt empty. It was busy–there were dinners out with friends, Netflix shows, jaunts off to Vegas–but it never felt full. My soul was starving, but I was distracted enough by the fleeting pleasures of being employed and paid that I got away with not paying attention.
Like many people, the pandemic pushed me back into writing. For two reasons:
- I was so freaking bored. I couldn’t go anywhere, and my attention span was so short that there was only so long I could sit in front of movies and shows with my brain melting.
- I started listening to writing podcasts on my walks. I hadn’t stopped reading this whole time, so there were still authors that I greatly admired for their craft. I remember listening to a podcast with two bestselling authors, and how one of them said something along the lines of “Keep writing, no matter what. And one day, you’ll get there.”
That made me rethink my philosophy towards writing. For some reason, I never thought that by continuing to write, you could get better. I always believed that my writing was frozen in time, trapped in its incompetence. I thought that once you got rejected once, that was it. That determined your worth. It sounds ridiculous now, but I always regarded writing as more art than science–your intrinsic talent determined how good it was. Hearing successful authors say that they’d tried for a long time before getting published gave me hope. And since I had the time, I enrolled in a creative writing course around August 2020.
The course itself wasn’t super enlightening. There was no workshopping, and the weekly feedback from the teacher never had anything constructive. But the assignments and knowledge that someone would be reading my work forced me to write. It also forced me to outline for the first time in my life, which became critical for me to finish something. Being in that course made me remember how much I love writing. It’s so hard to describe the way time bends and warps, the way space changes when I am writing. It brings me to another world, one where I am wholly dedicated to the characters I’ve created. It makes me feel like my stomach is full of bubbles, and I’m always minutes from burping them all up (this analogy was necessary). I was thinking about my story all the time, puzzling out the plot 24/7, and in a constant state of eager excitement to keep progressing in my wordcount.
Because I’d been beaten so low by that one writing professor’s feedback, I actually restrained myself from sharing the book I wrote with anyone, which helped. I wasn’t relying on anyone’s positive words to motivate me to the finish line. That willpower came from me alone.
By December, I had a finished manuscript. And I began learning about the world of real publishing. There were more rejections to come, but at the end of all the sadness, I would emerge with an agent.