Wanting vs. Doing (How I Became a Romance Writer, Part 1)

People on the outside think there’s something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn’t like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that’s all there is to it.” – Harlan Ellison

I was always someone who wanted to be a writer. But I didn’t have an MFA, or a writing fellowship, or writer friends.

Even though I was naturally talented at English subjects in school and a voracious reader, I had no proper training. Plus I had a job and responsibilities and no time to devote to writing.

If you’ve ever let excuses stand in your way of doing something, you know exactly what I’m talking about. If the permission isn’t already there, you stand in line waiting for it to happen.

Classic Good Girl Syndrome, and I had it bad.

In my job I always volunteered for writing projects. You need a customer service manual, a training program, or a speech? Pick me! Pick me! I wrote newsletters, annual messages to clients, and even started a website for my virtual team way back in 2001 to make us feel more connected.

In 2007 I left corporate America and started my own little solo company, and with it came a website and a blog. Three times a week, I wrote about marketing, systems, and productivity for women-owned businesses. The first time someone commented on my blog I freaked out.

People were reading what I wrote because they wanted to, and that had never happened before.

Then my brother had a heart attack at the age of 35, and I began reevaluating my life goals. He came so close to dying, and at age 36 I had my first serious thoughts about mortality. At the time I was working a lot of hours, about 50 pounds overweight, and still struggling with what I wanted to do in life versus what I thought was allowed. I vowed to lose weight, get serious about writing, and make the most of my life.

But then I didn’t. It’s a lot like New Year’s resolutions in a way. The gung-ho attitude is there for a few days or weeks, but without the proper motivation it withers and dies. Pretty soon, life goes back to normal, and that’s exactly what happened to me. My brother got better, and my motivation waned.

A year later, a good friend had a brain aneurysm, also at 35. This vibrant, successful woman – far more successful than me – was in the hospital, blind, disoriented, and possibly not going to live. If she did, what quality of life would she have?

This time I did not fall back into my very small zone of comfort. Two tragic events in one year to people we loved…it was too much.  My husband Warren and I asked each other the question that changed everything in my life, including the idea that I had to wait for permission to write.

“What would you change about your life today if you knew you wouldn’t make it to your 40th birthday?”

At 37, I only had a three-year window to consider in my answer. The obvious choice to me was the biggest one: to see the world. But what I didn’t realize at the time was how this decision would open up every other dream in my life.

Finally, I had permission – and the dawning realization that permission was always mine to give, in every area of my life.

We spent two years planning for our big adventure around the world, saving money, selling our belongings, and wrapping up our lives. But during that time, I took a few steps forward in writing.

The Married with Luggage blog was started, posting three times a week on what it was like to transition a life together. I wrote about fear, support, negative feedback, love, money, security, doubt, and excitement. Still, I didn’t consider myself a writer, even though I published about 3000 words every week.

Then on Labor Day weekend of 2009, a year after our decision to travel the world, I entered the 3-Day Novel contest. It’s an annual contest from a publisher in Canada that invites readers to submit 100 pages of a manuscript for consideration. The rules are that you cannot start on the book before Labor Day weekend except in outlining, and you must turn it in at the end of the weekend. They expect it to be rough, and from there they look for the diamonds.

Mine was definitely not a diamond. Not a cubic zirconia. Not even a nicely polished river rock.

But I did it. I wrote the first draft of a book, start to finish.

The change from wannabe writer to writer was quite easy logistically: I just had to write. To change the way I saw myself was harder. It wasn’t until I finished the contest and had been blogging three times a week for a year that I finally started thinking of myself as a writer.

I aligned myself with the work and the habit more than qualifications or commercial success, and in doing so I learned the most valuable lesson of all:

To be a writer, you have to write.

 All those years of wishing and wanting, when all I had to do was start typing!Sure, there are skills to be learned and ways to improve the craft – that’s the work of a lifetime – but the single most important thing is to write, every single day.

And that’s what I do, even when I only have a notebook in a ger on the edge of the Gobi Desert in Mongolia.

Coming up next week in the How I Became a Romance Writer series: Writing My Own Love Story First. And don’t forget that Wild Rose is already open for preorder with delivery on March 17. Click here to get your copy now.