When I was in high school I fell in love, hard, with classic novels. The Grapes of Wrath, Crime and Punishment, 1984. I had always loved reading but it wasn’t until those nearly-adult years that I discovered works that found their way right into my soul.
The poignancy of Steinbeck and the raw truth of Dostoevsky and Orwell jolted my budding social conscience. There were people out there who cared; who were trying to tell the rest of the world to pay attention. I was so impressed by that. It made me not only want to save the world but also to write about how to save the world.
But as I continued to grow older and (supposedly) wiser, I decided that maybe being a writer wouldn’t work. Part of it was that I didn’t know how, quite frankly. Having grown up in the pre-internet era I had no easy access to the kind of resources (like Kindle Direct Publishing or WordPress) that exist today. Then there was the barely contained disdain my parents and friends seemed to have for the idea. You’re being naive, they said. Or You won’t be able to make a living. Some advised: Get a good degree first so you have security. Others: What would you write about anyway? So I never tried; I decided it wasn’t possible.
Fast forward a few decades and find me milling around at a Barnes and Noble in my town. A school group I sponsor is hosting a fundraiser there and in one part of the store an author is signing autographs. She and her husband specialize in horror stories for teenagers and they have a ton of books on the table. And an impressive line of fans waiting to talk to them. I picked up one of the paperbacks to read the back cover.
“Do you have a teenager?” she asked enthusiastically, stepping away from the table. I explained that my son had grown up and moved out but I was sponsoring my high school’s debate team and they were certainly teenagers. She was the first author I had met in “real life” so I decided perhaps I should ask her the question.
“These stories look really interesting. How did you get started?”
So she told me all about her journey and how she and her spouse were currently on their third or fourth series. Business was good and they were making their living exclusively through their writing.
She asked if I had any interest in publishing. I replied that I’d love to do that but I didn’t think I was the type.
That remark launched a rather lengthy and interesting conversation about how wrong that remark was. In stark contrast to just about everyone else I ever told my writing aspirations to, this woman laughed and told me, essentially, that I was full of it.
“Anyone can do what we do,” she exclaimed. “You just have to start.” She went on to explain a little bit about how she got story ideas and how she and her husband worked together to create their books and series.
Listening to her made me realize it wasn’t others who had prevented me from writing all these years. It was me. I had prevented me from writing. Because I told myself I wasn’t the type. When other people echoed that sentiment it became part of me. It became what I told myself. I was, to put it mildly, stunned. I had no one to blame but myself for not becoming the writer I wanted to be.
In the days following that meeting, I began looking into how to write a book. The whole process was completely foreign to me. No one I knew had ever published anything. As far as I knew, no one I knew wanted to publish anything. And it’s not like there were any “How to Write a Novel” courses when I was in school. So I bought a book about writing and then I spent a lot of time reading about writing online. Then one day, somehow, I sat down and started doing it.
With a full time job and a household to maintain, finding time to think and write was not easy. But I remembered something John Grisham had once said about his own work. He made himself write at least a page per day. Minimum. And often, once he got started, it became more than that. So I figured that was as good advice as any and it was simple and doable. I didn’t have to quit my job or move into a secluded mountain cabin. I just had to sit down every day and write a page.
It was simple but not always easy. Still, I forced myself to write daily for nearly a year after that fateful day at Barnes and Noble and at the end of it all I had my first novel. It’s not published; not even self-published. But it is proofed and edited. I even entered it in a writing contest (that it didn’t win). I’m quite proud of it but because I care about the story so much, I haven’t tried to find a publisher or to publish it myself. It seems like one’s first stab at something is usually kind of a throw away. A dry run or practice. I didn’t want that to happen to that particular story so I put it on the back burner.
But the thing that mattered most was simply that I wrote the book. And I’ve written two others since then, one of which is self-published. I wrote The Vincent Story over the course of approximately a year, sometimes only one or two sentences a day. Literally. I would get home from work, do all my usual chores, then sit down to write. Of course waiting until after I had done everything else in a particular day was a bad plan. I was often thoroughly exhausted. But my rule was: write at least one sentence. Every day.
And it worked! I felt good that I was at least meeting my goal even on my worst days. Then on weekends or days off, I wrote much more. Writing a book, which had once seemed intimidating and too big to even start, turned out to be fun. My work isn’t Pulitzer material (yet) but it’s mine. I’m proud of it and I welcome the opportunity to continue to write, learn, and improve.
So my results from writing didn’t happen until I told myself it was possible. And of course I’ve heard all that before, about “believing in yourself,” (I even wrote about it on this blog). But I always imagined “believing” in myself to be about attitude. Being positive. And that’s part of it. But what it really means is that you simply go and do the thing you wish to accomplish because you know you can. It’s not just an inner pep talk everyday (which is the way I had formerly interpreted such advice). Believing in something means you act as if it’s real. And then one day, it is.
Henry Bergen wrote about the importance of what you tell yourself in his book, The 47 Laws of Success. The “what you tell yourself” problem falls under his Law of the Glass Ceiling. He explains it this way: “…whatever you believe you can achieve is the ceiling that determines what you accomplish.” I’ve heard variations of that theme throughout my life, but Bergen does an especially good job of explaining why it’s true and how it affects one’s life.
Essentially the subconscious mind doesn’t allow us to make full investments in endeavors we don’t think we’re worthy of. If we have a small view of ourselves, then we don’t believe we deserve big things. So we give up if the going gets tough or we chalk it up to luck if something amazing does come our way. Such attitudes are fatal to aspirations of any kind. We set ourselves up to rely on luck and hoping things don’t get too hard. Not a good plan.
Raising one’s glass ceiling is difficult. It’s not done just by repeating a few affirmations. Like most changes we try to make in our lives it requires consistent effort and starting over a lot. It happens a little bit at a time. It rises ever so slightly every time we just put on our sneakers and go running, instead of just planning to. Or when we spend a weekend actually organizing a side hustle instead of just dreaming about it. Sitting down to write a blog post or article or story without worrying if it will be good enough. We lift the ceiling even if we do none of those things in a given day, but forgive ourselves so we’ll have the chutzpah to start over again the next.
In other words, every time I don’t quit. Every time I don’t believe “it’s no use.” When I don’t decide to binge on the entire box of Oreos just because I had a few extra calories at lunch. That’s when I win. My life might not go from rags to riches overnight, but it can go to lesser worn fabrics. And that’s a start.
It’s too bad I didn’t catch on to that much earlier in life. but I’m certainly not going to waste any time regretting anything. There’s too much to do!
And many more books to write.