An Author Origin Story
My first unintentional all nighter as a kid was after renting Holes by Louis Sachar from the bookmobile, finishing it just in time to grab breakfast before heading back to school. My second was after trying to read The Hot Zone by Richard Preston at 12 and being so scared I had to put up glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling, but let's not get into all that.
From a young age, I fell in love with books. Their feel, their smell, the stories you could lose yourself in for hours on end. I spent an entire summer between high school and college living in the world of Hercule Poirot thanks to Agatha Christie, making my way through my grandma's collection of detective novels. (Ironically, I would also "take a break" from this hobby, reading, for over a decade by burying myself in video games. I'm still trying to crawl out of that hole.) And while I would get a couple poems published as a kid, it would be decades before I realized that I felt the same kind of love for writing.
I was one of those kids that got mostly As in school, always getting nothing but stellar feedback on my writing all the way through honors English classes in high school. Hitting college was the wake up call that taught me flying by the seat of my pants wasn't going to work anymore, but even then my creative writing never got anything but high praise freshman year. English 101 gave me a little glimpse of my passion for writing, opting to write a 9 page short story when our guidelines were 3-10 pages. I simply had a specific end point in mind for the story and wrote until I got there, I thought nothing of how much fun I was having while writing it.
The next (and last) English class I ever took was my first B since geometry back in high school. The teacher had us each do one-on-one meetings at the end of the semester to get our final grades and hear her feedback on our performance. The only thing I've forgotten is her name, everything else is stuck in my brain like gum to the bottom of my shoe.
She told me I should have had an A. She seemed so... exacerbated, talking to me about my performance. She complained that I always turned in the same draft for first and final, so I was docked points on the technicality of not putting in more effort after peer critiques. She questioned not my results, but my work ethic.
I didn't understand, what work was there left to do? All my classmates ever told me was that they liked it, it was well written. Maybe they had a grammar fix here of there, but I was never really given anything real to work with. Why should I go through and scrutinize my own work that hard when the people who were already doing that didn't have anything but glowing reviews to give me?
But the longer I sat on that, the more it affected me. For a while after that review, I blew it off as a teacher trying to "pull something out of me" that wasn't there. Then it evolved into anger. Why was I penalized for doing it right the first time? That seemed unfair, I convinced myself it was just a means to punish me for not following her preferred writing method. Because that's all it could be, right? Her preference. I liked my method of one and done, I didn't need to try hers.
Years later, I finally got my head out of my ass and realized what she was trying to say. She was trying to help me learn to lay the groundwork for my own success. I never wrote anything longer than a ten page paper in school due to my major, and that's a very manageable amount of writing to keep tabs on as you work. But what about 5,000 words? 15,000? What about a full length book? My writing process wasn't sustainable for larger works, but I couldn't see that back then.
That teacher saw something in me a decade before I would.
I had always wanted to be an artist, but I limited the viable options to either a visual artist, a photographer, or a musician. I never could make myself practice any instrument or art style long enough to make any meaningful progress, and photography was something I was always above average at but unwilling to sink real money into. Anything that didn't come to me without much effort quickly fell to the wayside. I've always been an instant gratification kind of person.
Through a comical series of events, I made my way back to writing in my 30s on a dare. After writing a random 5k erotic short story based on a table top character I play, I felt it. Excitement. Pride. Nerves. Passion. I wanted to keep creating, and soon that drive extended to a terrifying desire let other people read what I'd written.
That's when the anxiety set in. Would anyone like the finished product anywhere near as much as I had enjoyed making it? What if everyone hated it? Even worse, what if no one ever even read it?
I crushed my own hopes before they could even blossom, burying them deep down where I hoped the sunlight would never reach. The finished short story I had already written became "not good enough to publish" on a whim after I had already commissioned the cover art. The ~90k worth of work I had put into a novel was shelved before I could finish. I set myself up for failure at every turn in a preemptive prevention of hurt at the hands of others, accomplishing the same results with just my own fear. I'd be a little impressed with myself if it wasn't so pitiful.
But I emerged on top of the pile with a new found fire, definitive steps in place to get published. I'm reworking my short story to make it more in line with a traditional erotica plot since I'm no longer using it as a base for a small series of smuts. I'm outlining new books in a new world that I'm very excited to create and write in. I'm keeping my impulse to pull out in check with encouragement and vulnerability, talking to friends and loved ones to fight through it when I feel the sudden urge to give it all up.
And that's the story up to now! I'm pushing through as best I can, and hopefully I'll have something fun to share with you all in the near future to show the progress I've made. I've found a way to look forward to frightening future, and I hope you all can too.