Hard lessons in writing #1: You’re doing it wrong.

As previously mentioned, I’ve read many books on craft, attended many workshops, and peer-critiqued with many peers. That’s not how I started.

I didn’t know any of those things existed when I started writing at age eleven. I mean, really, what 11-year-old knows anything like that? Now I know that no matter what you’re into, there’s a community out there doing it, doing it well, doing it professionally, doing it for fun, and who know how to do it and can help you. At that age, no idea.

No idea, in fact, until I started working at a local coffee shop and discovered that another barista there was a Creative Writing Major in the MFA program at the college in town. We talked a bit about writing, but not much, until one day she handed me a bag full of books from her classes that she was done with. “I thought you might like these. If you can’t use them, donate them to the thrift store,” she said.

Books on how to write? Surely these must be grammar books and books about how to write college papers, I thought. Why would I like these? But I took them, politely, and flipped through them just to see what was up here.

And spent the next 3 days holed up in my apartment, learning how every. Single. Thing. I’d been doing. Was WRONG.

A crushing blow. My beautifully gigantic words? Wrong. My lovely, long, trailing sentences? Wrong. My Shakespearean soliloquies? Wrong.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

It was eye-opening in the worst possible way. Every newbie mistake, every “watch out for this!” every hack error, I had committed. I gave up. I put those new-used writing books down and I turned off my word processor and I thought, “I am a miserable hack.  Nothing I have written is any good. I will never be a novelist, no matter how good my mother says I am.” One of the pieces of advice repeated over and over again: Do NOT trust your mother, your best friend, or your high school English teacher for opinions on your writing. Unless they are writers, they don’t know what they’re talking about. All of those people had told me how great I was. None of them were writers. Not only was I a hack, I had been allowing rank amateurs to fan my egotistical flames. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

I gave it up. I put it down. I would write no more.

And then I got mad. Mad at the people who would tell me I was doing it wrong. Mad at the people trying to crush my dreams. And most of all, mad at myself.

I thought, so this will be some work. More work than you’ve already done. Fine. If this is your dream, you have to do some work. You’ve already got the grammar and spelling stuff down, great. That’s some work you don’t need to do. Now get this style crap figured out. YOU CAN DO THIS. Fuck those people who say you suck. You can learn, you can get better, and you can do this!

So I read. And I studied. And I took workshops. And I wrote.

And I realized something: Those books that had hurt me so, that had made so mad, were exactly what I needed. They weren’t trying to put me down, they were trying to show me the way. It was the best gift anyone could give: Helping someone who loved writing to do it well, do it well enough that they could maybe make a living at it. I went from pain and anger to joy and gratitude. Granted, this mindset took about a year, but it happened.

Writing a novel is a long, arduous journey. But there are people who will help you along the way. You may be doing it wrong — in fact, I’m betting you have if you aren’t now. It’s okay. You can learn to do it right.