E.C. Fuller's Blog, page 3

2019 Year in Review

I was going to post this in January 2020. Then February. Then March. And then the months smeared together when the pandemic erased everything. 

2019 was not a great year writing-wise. But you should see it, and I should own it. 

Lots of things happened this year. My part-time job turned into full-time, with all the blessings and curses that brings. I found a steady system for sending out short stories, created an editing schedule I actually stuck with, and God knows how many hours I’ve wasted on stupid tasks. 

This is my year of being a full-time idiot, with infographics, charts, and gifs. This is a long, long article. Here’s a table of contents.

Writing & Publishing Goals for 2019— did I meet my goals?Time Analysis— a break down of the hours I  tracked  Writing & Publishing Goals for 2020Closing ThoughtsTime Analysis

I started time-tracking last year with a system I devised. Here are the results for 2019!

Things take time. Obviously. 

If there’s one thing I learned from my time-tracking is that the little things take a lot more time than I’d thought. Researching magazines, formatting my stories the way they want, submitting them. Looking over other people’s stories for the writing group, showing up to the workshops. Updating the website. Hours submitting short stories, researching places to submit. 

But what did I accomplish?

Writing & Publishing Goals for 2019Continue writing 3 pages a day —Check

Nine straight years without missing a single day of writing, and the second full year of writing 3 pages every day! Woohoo!

Continue practicing self-editing —Check

A soft goal. I’d like to say I did it. For sure, this year I revised enough stories that I had a regular rotation of submissions.

Write or do writing-related work 36 hours a week. Stretch goal: 40 —Nope

I track this through a running weekly average. When I returned to being full-time, my average dropped to 33 hours a week. Still good, but it stings that I couldn’t keep that up. 

Type up 6 pages from old notebooks per day. When finished, keep no more than one notebook untyped—Nope 

I sort of did it. I did a good job of keeping up, until about three months or so before I moved to full-time. Then I said, “Fuck it, I have money now.” I hired my roommate to type up the rest. 

Post on blog at least twice a month —Nope 

I’ve published 21 blog reviews and analysis. For manga. (image: “This was supposed to be a writing blog”)

Begin working with editors, cover designers, and formatters on a novel-length story. Stretch goal: self-publish a novel by the end of the year—Nope

I commissioned a cover for a standalone novel that I didn’t return to until half a year later. No way is it ready for an editor. On the other hand, the first book in my trilogy is ready for an editor, and I have a list of freelance editors who I will contact… as soon as I have the money to pay them. Car trouble took bites out of my savings.  

Publish three works, either self-publish or place in magazines, or submit at least to 25 different places—Half Check

Nothing got published at all. But I did overshoot my submission goals. And I got two personal rejections, one with comments. I realize now that placing three works in magazines was a super lofty goal for 2019. Same with self-publishing. I’ll go into this more below.   

Set marketing goals—Nope 

Can’t have marketing goals if you ain’t got shit to market. 

Set sales goals—Nope

Can’t have sales goals if you ain’t sold shit. 

This year disappointed me. I didn’t spend my time as wisely as I could have. We all feel this way to a certain extent: we get sucked into a Youtube analysis or a manga, or we piddle around with projects that we tell ourselves, “When I have something ready to publish, I’ll have everything in place! Taking off will be a breeze!” but the project just sits there, because it can’t happen until you’re ready to publish, but you’re not ready to publish because you spend your time doing this side project instead! Where did all that time go?

Fortunately, in the middle of the year, I started tracking what exactly I was doing when I was writing, editing, researchings, etc. How much time was I spending writing articles? What about editing novels? Though I’m only working with half a year’s data, the results were interesting. 

I spent over 90 hours typing up old notebooks. That’s a little less than half the total time I spent editing this year alone. 

In hindsight, I think my goals for 2019 were overambitious. I couldn’t have made some of the more vague goals, like “Work with editors, formatters, and cover artists on a novel-length story.” I mean, I commissioned cover art for a novel, but the novel itself isn’t ready to face an editor. I’m doing the things that should come after finishing the novel. I’m making a book, but the words aren’t in the right order yet.

Writing Goals for 2020

This year, I’m going to keep my goals actionable.

Continue writing 3 pages a day

Obviously this time I’m going to do it on my computer. 1000 words a day might be a clearer goal, since I write small and write in large notebooks.

Edit for 1 hour a day. Stretch goal: 1.5 hours

Cribbed from my annual anti-NaNoWriMo, in which I edit a full-length novel instead of write one. I was able to edit 1.5 hours a day for the whole of November (it nearly killed me). One hour? Doable. 

Submit to at least 50 places. Stretch goal: 75

Cribbed from this article on Lithub. I didn’t realize last year that in order to submit a lot, you have to have a lot of stuff that’s submission ready. And if you don’t know how to edit your work to reach that level, then you’re wasting your time AND you’re wasting your chance on places that might otherwise take your work (since most places don’t reconsider a submission, even if you’ve overhauled your story). And this is, of course, for short story and poetry submissions. 

Hire editor for novel

This goal is deliberately vague. I’m not sure what the timeline would be following hiring an editor. What’s achievable? What’s not? I would like to have one novel self-published by the end of next year, but that was my goal last year. So, I’ll hire an editor and start working with them on cleaning up my work. 

Closing Thoughts

I am so twisted and torn up about this year. I escaped 2019 limping. 

If I were to take the harshest view, I was given an incredible opportunity: to have a salaried part-time job with benefits while I lived at home and cold write. Yet, I squandered that time by reading too much and typing up old notebooks rather than writing and editing more. I spent too much on notebooks and pens this year too. I didn’t make many of my goals, and I know I could have if I had just sent my work to more magazines, used better words in better orders, edited them with lapidary attention… et cetera is an eight letter word that contains a year of excuses. I have a front row seat to my daily failure to do more, better. 

It doesn’t help that in my personal life, I feel like I’m losing friends to the gradual, inevitable growing apartness elsewhere. It’s amazing to me that we stayed together as a writing group for so long. Literally each member is hundreds of miles from each other. We had a good run, and I miss them all. 

I won’t beat myself up for reading too much. Books have saved me before, and they are saving me now. 

There’s also the persistent feeling that writing is one of the least important things I could be doing with my time. Climate change, fascism, earning money, exercising. 

The feeling that I should be doing something else nags me. Even writing this Year in Review! Shouldn’t I be editing my books?

But the point of writing is to be read. I’ve been thinking about this past year about what I want my writing to do, what I think about writing and reading, who it’s for, and what I find meaningful and important. Sometime this year, writing became more than a way to entertain myself and think about things. 

This year, my blog has taken a more philosophical turn, thanks to the influence of Breadtube (HBomberguy, Philosophy Tube, and Contrapoints, among others). Where does meaning come from? How do things mean? The reality is, you can’t choose what snags your heart. I didn’t know that this year I would read books that would change the way I think about writing and how I want to be read. 

Elif Batuman’s The Idiot. Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels. Douglas Hofstadter’s Godel, Escher, Bach. 

I want to write something incredible, like these books. I write because I love to read. I don’t have a great story about my family telling me stories as a kid— we weren’t talkers. We were readers. We just liked reading. Early on, I found out that people wrote books, and I decided that I would do it too. I remember writing poetry when I was six and bugging my mom to wake up from a nap to copy the poem because her handwriting was prettier than mine. I loved reading Ray Bradbury, John Steinbeck, Rowling, and Pullman. And I grew to love writing that made me look at the world in a new way, or notice something that was always there, or never be able to see the world the same way again. I sought out lines that twisted alive with rich sensory detail. I wrote stories with pages and pages of description because I thought that’s what good writing needed— tons and tons of adjectives and adverbs!

I love the feeling when an author can put into words what you felt wounded you but could not identify, or when the book’s eyes blinked open and gazed kindly into your squishy and vulnerable soul. To learn more— about everything— everyone— writing to learn what you think about something. 

I enjoy watching people enjoy reading. 

I write because I want to write a book that someone will devour, at the end, sigh, “wow,” and feel both full and cored out, and when reread you find something new. I want to write something that means as much to them as my favorites did to me.

Every time I start a story, I forget how hard it is to finish it. But if I believed that the first draft was the last, then I would never have confidence in myself. Watching a story evolve from a passionate blurt to something that astonishes me has been one of the greatest satisfactions in writing. 

And that’s what this Year in Review is for— a way to look back with a gaze that cuts through the mundane myopia of anxiety, self-doubt and laziness— and compresses time to show what I have done is a lot more than I thought. Even as I fumble to write something that reaches the standards I yearn for. 

Around October, I submitted a very short story to my new writing group to workshop it. Somebody gave me the comment: “I feel like I can read this over and over and keep thinking about it.”

And that made nine years telescope into the certain knowledge that I was on the right path.

2019 will be my springboard into 2020. I feel it. 

The post 2019 Year in Review appeared first on EC Fuller's Books.

2018 Year in Review

This article was originally posted on longhandhabits.com.

It’s been a year. Quite a year. 

I won a local writing competition and received an honorable mention in another. I learned how to be a full time writer and build up knowledge around self-publishing, writing, editing, marketing, and blogging. I restarted my blog and have been keeping it up weekly. 2018 is the eighth full year that I have written at least two pages a day, and the first full year that I have written at least three pages per day. 

While I’ve technically made money from fiction and articles in the past, I’m establishing 2018 as the first year I began to work part-time writing fiction. I’ve always found yearly reviews and author income surveys helpful guides to structuring my writing life and setting long-term goals. See Kameron Hurley’s. Yet, I’ve never seen any for beginning authors, like me. 

So, I made one. Here are my numbers.

Some good, some bad. 

Methods

Admiral Rickover had a quote about systems that I like to repeat:

“I am always chagrined at the tendency of people to expect that I have a simple, easy gimmick that makes my program function. Any successful program functions as an integrated whole of many factors. Trying to select one aspect as the key one will not work. Each element depends on all the others.”

A writing career isn’t only putting words down. Pardon my swagger, but I haven’t missed a day without writing in eight years. I can fill up notebooks just fine. But what else makes up the daily life of a writer? And how do I know whether I’m being effective? After reading through author blogs, thinking about my habits, evaluating what I needed to improve, what I knew I would need to be successful, and goals, I made some guidelines for a system. 

The system had to accommodate everything that went into writing.The system had to be able to track what went into writing so I could measure it, compare it, and record it. The system had to be flexible, free, and simple. Google spreadsheets, Google calendar, and an add-on called TimeSheet worked perfectly together to achieve this.  

So, what goes into a writing career? There’s writing itself. Editing, research, outlining, and getting feedback. Marketing and networking. Reading, of course. And all the other small things that needed to be done. 

For number two, I needed to capture what I did daily in broad categories that I could measure. These categories had to be specific to distinguish different activity, yet broad enough that I get tripped up recording the difference between editing blog posts and editing fiction. 

I chose seven categories: writing, editing, website, research, outlining, reading, and other. Then, I defined each one.

Writing: Writing, rewriting, and typing up old journals. This is anything fiction, blog posts, creative nonfiction, etc. 

Editing: If I have a red pen in my hand or Tracking Changes is on Word or Google Docs, it’s editing. 

Research: If I have a notepad and pen in my hand, it’s research. It’s purposeful browsing. If I’m mindlessly browsing the internet, it doesn’t count. If I’m printing out articles and saving and bookmarking and adding them to my research binders and folders, or seeking specific knowledge, such as by going to the zoo, library, or interviewing someone, that’s research. 

Website: Maintaining, configuring, developing, designing, marketing blog posts and the website. 

Outlining: mapping out a story, adding facts from #Research. It also includes marketing strategies, financial planning, and book launches. In other words, anything that involves long-term planning. 

Reading: People are always surprised when I include reading as part of writing, as if I’m padding my hours with it. I include reading because a) I consider it as maintaining my muse and charging my creative batteries, b)it overlaps with #Research.  

Other: Anything that supports my goals, but happens too infrequently to assign its own hashtag. For example, attending conferences, author signings, book cover design practice. 

For number three, I track what I did through the day in my paper planner. At the end of the week, I enter all my time in Google Calendar and run TimeSheet. 

For example, I run a weekly blog to practice writing, analyze stories, build a readership, and build a web presence. SEO research, making banners on Canva, and other things like that to be supportive of my goal to be a writer (especially since readers find my work through my blog) So I track its time under the hashtag, #Website, either writing it down in my planner or entering it directly into Google Calendar. Calendar entries with hashtags are read and compiled into a spreadsheet report via TimeSheet.

It seems absolutely anal to record what I’m doing in such detail, but tracking my hours keeps me honest about where my time is going. It also helps me understand how long it takes to do something so I can plan specific writing goals, such as having a complete first draft, submitting to contests, reaching out to editors, etc. I worried that I would fall into the trap of searching for how to be productive rather than being productive, so when I found a system that worked for me, I stopped looking. It takes me about 15 minutes a week to update my hours.   

Money, Sales, Downloads

I also keep track of what I’ve spent on writing so far. This includes software, book covers, office supplies, writing conference tickets, and other expenses. And guess what? I’m not breaking even. AT ALL. 

Spent: $1371.97

Earned: $111.16

Ow. 

I did earn back some of it in a writing contest and through my royalties (woo!), but I doubt I’ll make bill-paying money until I put out a novel (which I hope will happen early next year— but I said that last year). Self-publishing is a start-up activity and I expect to spend over a grand on editing, book cover design, and marketing. I don’t know how I’m going to pay for that yet. Right now I’m saving what I can.

What I did buy, like the website revamping, ISBNs, line edits, et cetera, will pay off down the line. I won’t need to repurchase some of these for years. I included a “Worth it?” column in the spreadsheet with more detailed notes. 

Thoughts on Results

I’m mostly pleased with how my time is divided. More that half of my time is spent writing; the next largest chunk is reading, followed by editing. The rest is Other, Outlining, Website, and Research, together making up a little more than 10%. I wish I had been more detailed and tracked what I was writing, editing, etc, more thoroughly, but I think this is still a decent breakdown. 2018 has been invaluable as a year of incubating, learning, self-disciplining, and goal-setting. 

Most Valuable Things I Learned This Year#1 How to self edit

It used to be that I would start a short story and it would take me months and months to edit. Why? Because I didn’t know what to look for! I was dependent on epiphanies to solve my problem or have a friend point it out. Now I know how to sift through my words to seek specific things. The most valuable books I read this year were Peak, The Artful Edit, and re-reading my old college notes. I wrote a post on how I edit for NaNoWriMo.

#2 How to Split My Time

Routines, quotas, and deadlines makes every day productive. 3 pages everyday in my notebook. 5 pages typed up everyday. Monday blog posts must be scheduled before Sunday. I make monthly goals in my planner, like having 3 journals typed up by the end of the month. I have yearly goals, which I never make. But I know they’ll get done eventually. 

#3 How to Self-Publish* 

*Without making a fool of myself. I have the basics of uploading and formatting and sharing short stories on Kindle only, but that’s all. 

#4 How to Improve

I wrote a blog post about Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise and how I would apply it to blog writing. I’ve since applied it to more areas of writing, and everything has been improving at a whalloping pace. See #1. 

What I Need to Improve Next Year#1 How to market/ getting my work out there

I used to work in a call center, and, astonishingly, I loved it. So I don’t know why it’s been such a pain in the ass to do internet marketing. I’m always hesitant to submit my blog posts as links on Reddit or share my work; though I know I’ll need to before I start publishing longer work.

#2 Priorities

I have several long-term projects in the pipeline and I’m unsure how to prioritize them. On one hand, I know I need to get my work out into the world, get feedback, and improve. On the other, once it’s out in the world, I will have to start thinking of reader expectations, how publishing changes them, and what I want to write fits into them. I think I will probably edit and send out my shorter stuff first so that I get a feel for editing, and then work on my longer stuff. 

#3 Formatting & Cover Design

I’ve decided that I will learn how to format my own ebooks, and at least do my own covers for my shorter works. I like learning about book design, so I feel like I’m having fun and working at the same time when I post my satirical book covers on tumblr. I’ll probably go with a professional for print books, but otherwise, I feel confident formatting my own work for digital. 

#4 Reading

I want to read more, but I’m also impatient to finish my work! A tsundoku rises at my right hand whenever I dive into an editing project. 

#5 Writing

I always aim to be better, and I will always include writing in things to improve. Specifically, I want to learn how to incorporate symbolism and metaphor and improve my sense of rhythm and style. Also, I’d like to write more blog posts on a wider variety of media, like podcasts, longform journalism, and other things like that. 

I’m going to poke at editing and writing a little further. This summer, I started using this  weekly blog to practice editing. Since then, my blog posts feel tighter and more alive. However, it takes time to research, write, and edit these. While they’ve helped me improve, the posts don’t get as much traction as I would like. I read too many different kinds of books to establish a niche. 

My true goal is to be a fiction writer, not a blogger. I felt like the weekly blog has been a detour away from my goal— a detour that has helped me become a better writer, but still a detour. 

2019 New Year’s Resolutions

2018 was the first year I’ve worked at least part-time hours for fiction writing; my growth during that time has been incredible, and I’ve accomplished things that I didn’t know I should have been on my radar, such as restarting my blog, learning book design, and learning how to self-edit. I also received surprising honors: an honorable mention in a state-wide writing contest, reaching the top 15% in an international competition, and outright winning a local literary contest. It’s heartening to see that people like my writing, because that’s the entire point— to writing stories that people enjoy and find deeper meaning. This wouldn’t have been possible if I didn’t set goals for 2018.

To shape goals for 2019, let’s look at 2018’s goals:

Submit to at least two contests, publications, or magazines a month. That’s 24 submissions for the whole year. Doable. But I only sent 20. I stopped applying in the summer after reevaluating my goals and budget (submitting to literary magazines gets expensive). Though, I received good responses from the submissions, so I don’t believe it was a total wash. Write or do writing-related work at least 20 hours a week, 25 hours stretch goal. If you calculate my yearly average, I made my stretch goal! If you only include my weekly average post job switch, I overshot the stretch goal by 11 hours. (graph)Publish the goddamned audiobook. Unfortunately, this goal will probably go unheeded. The audio quality of the recorded short story, Without Magic , isn’t great. I don’t know when I’ll be able to rerecord it. For now, audio projects are shelved. And finally. . . three pages a day. I did it! Never missed a day!

What should my goals be for 2019? Consider how I spent my time in 2018 and evaluating where I am at now, I think my priorities for 2019 should be getting my work published, either through magazines, on Amazon, or elsewhere. With that in mind. . . .

WritingContinue writing 3 pages a day. Gotta keep doing what works. Continue practicing self-editing. Ditto. But, rather than practice self-editing on blog posts, I’ll do it for fiction. Write or do writing-related work 36 hours a week. Stretch goal: 40. This is adjusting for my new job hours. I won’t know how the future will change or how my priorities will change on a month to month basis, but as long as I make time to write and do everything to support it, I’ll be okay. Type up 6 pages from old notebooks per day. When finished, keep no more than one notebook untyped. I write first drafts longhand (if you haven’t guessed by the name of the website). Unfortunately, sometimes I don’t have time to type up my notebooks, and they accumulate, pushing back my ability to edit and polish my work in a timely fashion. I’m struggling to pare down my backlog now. So this year, I’ll work on keeping everything updated.PublishingPost on blog at least twice a month. Yeah, I know. It’s not enough for a blog. But it’s not going to be a priority this year.  Begin working with editors, cover designers, and formatters on a novel-length story. Stretch goal: self-publish a novel by the end of the year. Self-published authors will point out that publishing frequently is better. I doubt I’ll self-publish more than one novel than one this year, due to the expense of hiring someone to do cover art and print formatting, unless I break even on the first novel. Publish three works, either self-publish or in magazines, or submit at least to 25 different places. I’m kicking myself for only self-publishing one short story this year. Next year, I want to push for getting my work out, either self-publishing or through literary mags. I still write literary fiction and creative nonfiction essays, and I want to place those in homes that suit them. Set marketing goals. I asked for Harvard Business Review books for Christmas, and I’ll refine my marketing strategy after I read them.Set sales goals. Again, I’ll have to set them after I do more research. Tentatively, I’d like to make back through sales what I spend on editing, formatting, cover design, submission fees, etc. Though, I’m taking the long view in self-publishing, and I imagine it will take years to be solvent.Closing Thoughts

I’d love to say that this all is due to my work ethic and smarts, but writing 36 hours a week and spending over $1,000 on this writing dream wouldn’t have been possible without my parents letting me live at home. Granted, my job is decent for being part-time (26k with benefits, in a cheap state), but it’s not enough to move out on my own. Plus, if I did move out, I wouldn’t be able to save. I’ve talked to both of my parents about taking part-time work while I write. My mom thinks it’s perfectly fine— I have a feeling that she would keep me at home forever if she could. My dad wishes I could be more self-supporting, but also knows that times are different from when he was my age. It helps that he knows I’m not piddling around. For Christmas I ask for things like printer ink, books on writing or business, subscriptions to literary magazines, and other things like that. It’s cliche, but it’s true: I couldn’t have done this without my parents. Looking back over the year, the schedule, my circumstances, and my life, I see how little of my success depended on my work ethic and talent, and how much depended on having parents, teachers, and friends who believed in my potential.

Overall, I’m satisfied with how much I’ve done over the year, though I’m still impatient. I’m kicking myself for only self-publishing one short story. For not having both short stories proofread before putting them up on Amazon. For spending money on a cover I never used. 

John McPhee, in his appropriately named book on writing, Draft No. 4, included an anecdote about an editor at the New Yorker. The editor had brought the magazine up and shaped its vision and mission, and, now ready to retire, was seeking his replacement. At the same time, he also sat down with writers and other editors to lead fine-tuning of articles for the magazine. 

McPhee asked him, “How do you spend so much time and and go into so much detail when [The New Yorker] is yours to hold together?”

The editor replied, “It takes as long as it takes.”

I keep this quote above my desk as a reminder to stop comparing my beginning to somebody else’s. In 2017, I attended my local writing conference, discovered that the winner of a short story writing debut contest was my age, and it really irked me. While she was reading her work, I kept having these petty, nasty thoughts; she’s making too much mouth noise as she speaks into the microphone, her story isn’t interesting, I don’t get it, et cetera. But after she was done reading, I thought, “Why am I jealous? I didn’t even submit to this contest.” Consequently, I reevaluated what I was doing to reach my wants. Hint: I wasn’t doing much. My jealousy stems from my frustration that I’m not where I think I should be as a writer—published, award-winning, a genius (I know). When I reevaluated, I realized that I had no good reason to think that I would be a published, award-winning genius, because I wasn’t working like a published, award-winning genius. I read in Shounen Note, “The person I want to be is so far away that it makes me cry. . . even so, I’ll do what I can.”   

I wonder sometimes if I’m so focused on improvement and productivity that I will lose the joy I feel from writing. I love writing, but it’s not tender loving. Sometimes I feel nostalgic towards my past work, because those are records of how I was then, like looking at a scrapbook or graduation pictures. Writing consumes me. There are times when I don’t feel like doing it, or am frustrated when whatever I’m slogging through won’t shape up. The times when I’m writing, when the words connect one after another, and I submerge into a waking dream, when life around me mutes, the pen has no resistance on the paper as I transcribe imagination to page. Those times are too rare to be dependable. I don’t write everyday because I love writing so much that I have to do it every day. I write every day to like what I finish writing. Finishing something to the best of my ability that meets the standards I’m writing for is satisfying. My satisfaction comes from watching myself grow, working language and ideas to develop a story, and hearing how others enjoy it. It’s fascinating to learn about the world and how we try to understand it, and how language can or can’t capture it. On the days and nights these are absent, that words don’t come easy and images are nebulous, I write anyway. And often, I fall into that trance all writers know. I write for more than joy. I write for a deeper satisfaction. 

Borges said about writing and work that best captures what I mean:

“A writer’s work is the product of laziness, you see. A writer’s work essentially consists of taking his mind off things, of thinking about something else, of daydreaming, of not being in any hurry to go to sleep but to imagine something . . . And then comes the actual writing, and that’s his trade. That is, I don’t think the two things are incompatible. Besides, I think that when one is writing something that’s more or less good, one doesn’t feel it to be a chore; one feels it to be a form of amusement. A form of amusement that doesn’t exclude the use of intelligence, just as chess doesn’t exclude it, and chess is a game I’m very fond of and would like to know how to play — I’ve always been a poor chess player.”

It’s work, but it’s not. It can be tiring, but a good, satisfying tiredness that comes from exerting yourself. Sometimes it’s frustrating and difficult. I can be impatient, like waiting for birth. I want to know how it turns out, it being my life, the story, and how readers like it. 

I didn’t feel this way until I realized that I would never be able to stand shoulder to shoulder with my heroes unless I got my shit together. Technically speaking, I’m a full-time writer. Yet, I know I’m still emerging. I don’t think I’ll consider myself a full-time writer until I have a print copy of my novel in my hands. I’ve always considered myself a writer of novels— that’s what I’ve wanted to do ever since I was told, “Write the books you want to read,” The stories that I first wrote were huge, unfinished things. I finished the first first draft of a novel in high school, which has been put to rest somewhere in my computer. Back then, I just wrote. My stories were shit, but people encouraged me, and I thought that was the same as being good. There wasn’t a defining moment where I started competing. Somewhere along the line it just became harder to write without noticing other people. I became jealous of others’ successes, even if they weren’t writing in the same genre or starting in the same place. I realized that my stories weren’t great. (I recently began revising some college stories I wrote. I should apologize to my writing teachers.) Something had to change. So I changed. Or, rather, I changed back to how I was when I first started writing. I reread the books that inspired me to become a writer— Harry Potter, His Dark Materials, Fahrenheit 451, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn— and the books that awed me in college— Autobiography in Red, Desert Solitude, and The Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I remembered that I became a writer because I love reading. I love that reading helps me understand the world, the magic of language, and the connection to ideas. How a great book makes me see something in a certain way, that makes me say, “I didn’t think of it that way, but it’s true.” How a great book changes the way you look at the world.  

I love writing, and everything that goes into it. It’s overhearing a musical, evocative phrase on the bus to work— “She’s got a body like a dropped lasagna.” It’s reading a book and finding a solution to a problem in a story or something that sparks my imagination, which kickstarts a period where I’m jiggling my legs at work and clockwatching because I want to rush home and write. It’s the pleasure of watching a story come together, from atomized words and free-floating ideas, arranging, building up, or grown to be something vivid and responsive to the reader. The catharsis in watching someone enjoy it. It’s sitting at my desk and watching light play across it one quiet afternoon. The snow smoothing the edges from the mortar and stone of the window ledge; it’s watching dragonflies sewing across the lion-colored lawn of summer; it’s the daffodils trumpeting under the sycamore; it’s the frogs who stick to my window and lunge for the gnats and moths beckoned by the light from my midnight sessions. 

Shounen Note said, “[w]ithin the gradient of everyday life, I changed and became who I am before I knew it.”

It takes as long as it takes. 

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About the Author

E. C. Fuller grew up in Claremore, Oklahoma and graduated from the University of Chicago in 2016. She is the short story category winner of the 41st Annual Adult Creative Writing Contest hosted by the Tulsa City-County Library and received an honorable mention in the young adult novel category of the Oklahoma Writers’ Federation Annual Writing Contest. She has been published in the Tulsa Review. She lives and works in Tulsa, OK.

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