Writer

I am still too scared to tell most people that I’m a writer. Even now, I want to hit delete and erase the words.

There’s the anticipation of an eye roll and I brace myself for questions. “What do you write?” people ask. “Are you published?”

I feel stupid with my answers. I’ve written novels, all rejected countless times, left to die on my computer. I tell myself this latest one feels different, this one is going somewhere, but I don’t really know that. It’s easier to say nothing at all, to sink down inside of myself, to try and blend in.

The only writing I’ve ever been paid for is an opinion piece on banned books that was published in a local newspaper. The photographer for the paper came to my school and took my picture, my teal braces pixelated in the color printing. I was thirteen and they paid me ten dollars. It was the start of my writing career I thought back then, the first of many pay stubs.

I take my children to school and then I write in sweatpants and cozy socks. I pack my children’s lunches, help with homework, wash their clothes, put them to bed, hold them when they’re scared, kiss them when something hurts. And still I write. I grow flowers in the garden and run and write and write and write.

My daughter once told her class that I was retired. She didn’t quite understand what it meant to leave a job in the middle of a career, a career that had defined who I was in many ways. But she later told her class that I was a writer and her teacher invited me to come in and talk about it. I didn’t want to go, felt like a fraud, worried her teacher would realize I wasn’t a real writer. 

But I went. I swallowed my insecurities and I talked to my daughter’s class, children crowding my feet on the carpet. I told them anyone could be a writer, that you could take your writing with you wherever you went, with whatever future job you had. I told them these words partly so I could believe them myself.

You have not failed until you stop trying. These words were etched on a chalkboard on my grandpa’s desk. I walked by them my entire childhood. Over the years the words became etched in my brain too. Just keep going, just keep trying, I always tell myself. 

I track my queries with spreadsheets and when I am inevitably rejected, that literary agent’s line turns from black to red. My documents are a sea of red, the black sometimes disappearing almost as soon as it was created. 

To be a writer is to be told no over and over again. This is the nature of the work, something I’ve grown accustomed to over the years, something I’ve expected. With my latest novel, the very first agent I queried requested the full manuscript two hours later. This wasn’t a no, wasn’t something I expected. And so I sent her the manuscript before school let out for the summer. I was busy and tried not to think about what it could become.

When my children went back to school, I started to think about a yes, started to wonder when I would hear back. But there was still silence. Finally, weeks after I expected a response, I emailed her and soon had my answer. It was a short email, a quick response without details, and it was another no.

I am learning that nothing for me is ever riding on a single moment. That I will be rejected over and over again. But some days I think that maybe I’m not good enough. Maybe my words are supposed to be only in my head. Maybe I’m a writer, just not a very good one.

Maybe my garden is my way of creating my own beauty that I can touch and hold, share with others. I plant seeds and tubers and in a few months there are flowers where once there was only earth. Even when there are pests and storms and disease there are flowers, beauty among all the weeds. Maybe that is also true of my writing. Maybe the blank pages that stare at me are more beautiful after I’ve put words on them. Maybe my words now are the seeds I’m planting for later. Maybe there is more to my writing than just rejection.

I will learn from my rejections, grow and change but still be me. There is beauty in progress, there is value in doing something meaningful even if my words are only read by a few. There is value in brushing myself off and always trying again. 

I am a writer because I write, because I have been filling notebooks with stories since I was a little girl. I am a writer because I don’t know how to be anything else. And maybe, just maybe, the feeling I have when I step into my garden on a crisp fall morning—the bees still resting in the flowers, is felt by those who read my words and my stories.