Works in Progress
First draft:
Editing: The Amulet of Sìochàin
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| Why I Write |
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I consider myself to be a writer. Many people say that in order to be a writer, you have to write - and yes, technically, that's true. But for me at least, being a writer is more a state of mind, something that's true regardless of whether I am at that particular moment in time actually writing something or not. Because there have been times in my life where I haven't written a single word that wasn't forced out of me, when I've refused to pick up a pen unless absolutely necessary - but even then, I've wanted to write. I remember the first time I realised that I was a writer at heart. It was in Year One at primary school - which means I must have been six or seven. I even remember the paper I wrote on. It was cut out to the shape of a teddy bear - I guess bears must have been the theme of the story. I remember getting annoyed because the shape of the paper meant I couldn't get enough words on the page. I also remember writing about three times as much as anyone else in the class. I couldn't stop. I couldn't get enough of that feeling of creating something, the sheer excitement of using all those words. And all through my school life, whenever I did any kind of creative writing, I was incapable of sticking to word counts - there were too many ideas trying to make their way onto the page. But it's only been in the last couple of years that I've started to really make time for my writing. While I was at university, I found that often the essays I had to write were so dry and tedious that they began to almost taint my perception of the process - I will never be an academic writer. But the year I finished university was also the year I discovered NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month. And that went a long way towards putting the fun back into writing. It's only been in the last few months that I've started to seriously consider the possibility of trying to earn money from my writing. Last week I sent off my first submission to a fiction magazine - a short story, 2400 words, fantasy. (Since I first read C S Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia, a much treasured Christmas gift from my parents, fantasy has been my genre of choice.) Two days later my first rejection arrived. It was a big moment, and I said to my husband that it made me feel like a real writer. But that's not really what it was. I've felt like a writer for a long time. But it was the first time that I'd made that announcement to the world. It was the first time I'd said, I'm a writer and I plan to do something about it. I'm still young. I'm lucky enough to know what I want to do at an early age and have the whole of my life to follow that dream. I'm not going to lie and say that being published doesn't matter to me - it does. If it didn't, I wouldn't have sent that story out there. But it's not everything. I don't crave fame, and I'm well aware that publishing is rarely a lucrative business. I am a writer - and I will continue to be that whether or not my name ever appears as a byline in a magazine or on the spine of a book. |