Age 9: I write a winning poem (“...a magical kite / flying at night / flying over the sea with me...”). I get to go to a workshop in a city an hour's drive away, where I play with little white mice and listen to Lois Lowry give a keynote speech. My poem is published in an anthology along with the poems from other winners.
Age 10: I receive my first rejection letter: my manuscript for Griselda the Grasshopper, a children's book I have written & illustrated, “does not meet our publication needs at this time.”
Age 11: I start keeping a regular journal.
Age 12: My first creative writing teacher introduces the class to the concept of “freewriting”. My classmates are all high school juniors and seniors, and they endure my presence with good grace and not a little teasing. When it comes time to vet poems submitted to the school's literary magazine, the other kids vote in every poem I have submitted (no doubt recognizing my handwriting, and not wanting to hurt my feelings). The teacher takes me aside to explain that it wouldn't be fair for me to have more than one poem in the magazine; she asks me to pick my favorite. It isn't until I see the issue in print that I realize that this one-poem-per-poet rule apparently applies only to me.
Age 13: I write two chapters of a historical romance in which a 15-year-old girl named Charlotte (Charie, for short) is supposed to end up shipwrecked on an island after her channel crossing to Britain goes awry.
Age 14: My second creative writing class is a little less inspiring than the first, but at least two of my poems get published in the literary magazine this time. On the other hand, I'm also taken in by a scam: after sending in some poems to a contest, I learn that I am among the winners, and need only send $15 to receive my copy of the publication. I'll never see those poems, or that $15, again.
Age 15: I take a pair of scissors to A Streetcar Named Desire and rearrange the pieces to make a long monologue that ends very dramatically with a wistful, southern-inflected, “They told me to take a streetcar named Desire...and then switch to one called Cemeteries...and get off...at Elysian Fields....” As Blanche Dubois, I win a lot of trophies.
Age 16: My A.P. English teacher tells me that my essays need to be more “discursive.” When I ask him what that means, he says, “It means you need to organize your ideas better.” It isn't until years later that I learn he's got it backwards: “discursive” actually means “free-flowing; rambling.”
Age 17: I begin penning heavy allegories and using freewrites to figure myself out.
Age 18: At BYU, I take another creative writing class – the theme is “Passions.” I've been watching a lot of Bergman and Tarkovsky, plus dealing with an existential crisis, which means that I treat the course as therapy. My final project elicits stunned bewilderment from the professor, who calls my writing “Kafkaesque” and adds, “...Help!”
Age 19: As Student Supervisor at the Sweet Shoppe in the Student Union, I type up a letter detailing all the inefficiencies I have noticed while working there – I cover everything from scheduling to ordering supplies to the way in which rangy, schizophrenic Aura mashes up the oreos we use for cookies 'n' cream milkshakes. When I show this rhetorical masterpiece to my husband, he says it's disorganized. But hey, my hourly wage gets raised to $5.35.
Age 20: When Tyler and I hike over 1,000 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail, I try my hand at travel writing. I keep a public journal, mailing installments home every time we stop in a town to restock our supplies.
Age 21: Having decided to return to college as an English major, I use up every single elective allotted to me on creative writing classes. One of my instructors tells me he doesn't just like my poetry – he respects it. He admires it. And he is going to be “brokenhearted” if I don't continue writing it. The eccentric professor of my Gender Roles class seems to concur; she tells me she hopes I am planning to be a writer some day. But when I consult one of my English professors about whether I ought to apply to the M.F.A. program in creative writing, he says that M.F.A.'s are a dime a dozen, and the M.A.-to-Ph.D. route is the one that makes most sense.
Age 22: Between degrees, I do a brief stint in journalism. I write a few reviews for CitySearch, getting something like $12 per article. I collaborate with my mother-in-law on a story about storage units, abandoned stuff, and the mysterious disappearance of a family with three midget children; it wins some kind of award.
Age 23: I start graduate school. Because I have been given a teaching fellowship, I also begin what will become a 10-year career in teaching composition. I'll attempt to teach my students how to write essays that don't annoy me when I'm grading them. I'll spend a lot of time sitting propped up in bed with a stack of papers on my lap, scribbling purple notes in the margins about factitious cohesion and nominalizations.
Do you remember the feelings you had when you were writing creatively, especially when you were young? When you wrote your story, for instance. Your post chronicles what you did and whether it was accepted or rejected, or some combination thereof, and everyone has feelings about acceptance or rejection, My curiosity is about how you have felt during the creative process and how has that fueled or curtailed your writing.
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