Sometimes I think I’m the only would-be novelist who didn’t grow up wanting to be one.
Journaling from the time they could pick up a pencil. Every creative writing class they could find in high school and college. Previous careers in editing, journalism, tech writing, etc. Though I’ve met exceptions most writers seem born to this.
I’m one of the apparent few who took a while to get here.
Mind, I always wrote. My parents gave me a diary at around age 11 and I pedantically wrote something every day, even when nothing happened. This probably gave me the idea I had nothing to write about.
Also I was really into animals as a kid. I idolized Jane Goodall and figured any job that let me watch animals all day sounded good. But wildlife tended to live outside, where there weren’t any bathrooms or climate control. So that was out.
In high school I considered graphic arts and kept a sketchbook, but there wasn’t much writing involved. Nonetheless by college I’d somehow landed in the journalism school, mostly because of my love for college radio. I ended up doing the odd record review for the college newspaper, because I wanted to be the next John Peel and tell people about wonderful music they’d never heard of. Maybe that gave me a hint that I did have something to say, after all.
I finally graduated in fashion merchandising-not design, because while I loved clothes and making them I wanted to put food on the table.
And then the internet blew up, and I got into tech through the side door of self-taught HTML. Over time the internet moved from the IT department to communications, but it’s still not really writing, is it?
Sometime in my twenties I started writing fanfic and playing in a text-based role-playing game. Feedback was instant and usually positive, and my fellow RPGers were fantastic at chasing my characters up trees, which forced me to invent ways to get them down. But I didn’t think of it as writing, not really. Just fun with friends. Nothing to interest anyone outside our small circle.
And then I read about John Dee and Edward Kelley.
Not for the first time, probably – with my lifelong interest in Tudor history I’d likely run across them before. But for the first time I read a biography of Dee and realized the extent and duration of his and Kelley’s “angelic” seances. And I got to wondering how it could have gone on so strange for so long?
I think that was the tipping point: asking “what if?” finding no ironclad answers, making up some of my own, and thinking other people might find my answers interesting and fun.
All of the sudden so many “what if?”s sprung to mind. I keep a file of them, for the next book. And the next…
I don’t know yet if I’ll ever get the Dee/Kelley book or any of my other ideas published but for the first time I think I’ve got something to say. So I’ll keep writing until I don’t.
Please publish it! If only so your years of research can be appreciated properly by a wider audience (and, selfishly, so I don’t have to awkwardly beg for a copy of the manuscript to pilot-read because the topic is absolutely fascinating).
Hi! Thank you for commenting!
Watch this space for my ongoing adventure into getting conventionally published. Third draft is in progress; my aim is to have something ready to put in front of possible editors at the Historical Novel Society conference next summer!
Sometimes the clues are subtle, waiting for the right life trigger. I always figured I’d be going into art in some form. Five members of my family (great-grandfather, grandfather, two great uncles, and eldest son of one of those great uncles) were professional artists within the family church decoration business and while I’ve been an atheist by nature for as long as I can remember, there were loads of other non-religious options. But, while I am a reasonably decent artist I often ran into problems connecting conception and execution (took me until I was 30 or so to discover that other people can make up pictures in their brains, while I’d always thought “mental picture” was just a saying, not a reality). At the same time that I was starting to realize what I produced in art classes was always a complete surprise to me, I started volunteering in my high school library, gradually being trusted with greater responsibilities than the other student volunteers, and then the librarian started teaching me cataloguing and classification when I was in eleventh grade. And that was magic. That same librarian steered me towards library technician programs (which were fairly new at the time) rather than librarianship (he was a very wise and personality-perceptive man) and also wrote a letter of recommendation for my college applications. I remember my grandfather telling me at the time that he was a bit disappointed that I wasn’t going into an art program but that it was good that I was pursuing something that called to me.
Looking back, I had a lifelong love of putting bits and pieces together to make things: various non-LEGO building bricks, my brother’s Meccano … hey, HE never played with it … handsewing from the age of five plus embroidery, crewel, crochet, knitting, rugmaking, weaving, and a host of other fibre-related skills added after that, puzzles of all kinds including working on my mother’s 500+ piece jigsaws while still a preschooler. I began my career in the days of card catalogues and enjoyed it very much; then computer-based cataloguing came along and … WOW!!! Cataloguing/classifying became the ultimate multi-dimensional, never-ending puzzle that is continually having bits added, subtracted, altered, everything connects to everything, and it can never ever bore me. Books and reading have been a big part of my life since I was born (literally: Mom had at least one storybook in her hospital bag and I was read to for the first time within 24 hours of my birth). Cataloguing and classification, BTW, isn’t really about reading … that remains a recreational activity for me. C&C is all about description and information and connecting the dots between them so that seekers of information can find what they want/need.
It’s been a great privilege being allowed to watch the online side of your writing journey and I hope I’ll someday have your book(s) in my bookcases. 🙂