The Idea of Being a Writer

Boatload of Books: A Deep Downeast Bo... At Long Last!

The Idea of Being a Writer

Rob Kelley here, and I was talking to one of my editors, Scott Wolven, after he and his partner-in-crime at High Frequency Press, Shanna McNair, did a joint reading of their two new books at Portland’s Print Bookstore in late June. Over drinks we talked about a technique he shares with writers striving to be published.

Go to your local bookstore (this photo is from one of mine, Arctic Tern in Rockland, ME), find where your book would be on the shelves and make room for it (I put it all back, I promise!). It’s a form of manifesting, I guess (anyone who knows me I’m the least woo-woo person on the planet), but it does create a powerful image.

The idea of being a writer has been in my head since I was a little kid reading and dreaming of creating worlds like the ones I was discovering. I tried my hand at stories, but I was missing a critical ingredient that would let me go the distance: space. Space in my brain to let out my wild, creative self (not super easy for me . . . see woo-woo, above) and space in my life to take the time to do it right. To write, revise, incubate, revise and repeat. To go to classes and conferences and become a student again.

More than a student, a practitioner of shoshin, the Zen Buddhist concept of “beginner’s mind.” As a type-A kind of guy, I really hate being bad at something, being a beginner. And while, yes, I had an exceptionally busy professional career, I wrote a very early precursor to Raven (forthcoming 2025, High Frequency Press) in the 1990s! But it wasn’t very good, and I knew it. I chipped away at it over the next few years but didn’t really make any progress on it until around ten years ago when I picked it back up and started doing real work.

I started attending writing conferences and getting serious about working explicitly on my craft. I took a Stanford Continuing Studies class online, then started going to the Muse and the Marketplace conferences that Grub Street puts on in Boston. Then came Maine Writers and Publishers Crime Wave here in Portland, ME and Crime Bake in Boston. I took masters classes at Thriller Fest in NYC as well as here in Maine with our fabulous thriller writer colleagues Gayle Lynds and Chris Holm.

The point of all that is that I needed to create the mental space to be a beginner, a state I worked hard to rediscover, and one I keep fresh by always trying to be humble in my writing (funny how the work seems to do that for me!), while also trying new things to challenge myself, most recently taking up the cello!