No One Said it Would be Easy
In the third grade, I won the Young Author’s Award for my school and received the honor of hearing a real author speak to a group of aspiring writers in downtown Fort Wayne, Indiana. It was then that I knew I wanted to be an author. When adults asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said, “I want to be a teacher and an author.”
If you know me, you know I fulfilled my first aspiration of being a teacher. I retired in 2018 after teaching physical education to elementary-aged children for thirty years in a small town in North Georgia. Naïvely, I believed I would retire from teaching and write books, thus fulfilling both my childhood dreams. I’m learning there is a tad more to becoming an author than writing.
Teaching for thirty years no more qualified me to be a writer than an eye surgeon or a lawyer. I am embarrassed to tell you I didn’t know writing would take a good ten to twenty years to learn and develop the craft. I also did not know being an author meant also becoming an expert in technology, editing, publishing, and marketing. While I’m divulging my naivety, I may as well tell you I honestly did not know until halfway through my senior year in high school that to teach physical education, I would need “one of those four-year degrees.” Because I was naïve as a child and sometimes still am, it never offended me when students asked me if I “ever wanted to be a real teacher.”
The people I have met in this world of writing are a unique lot. Some are household names. Some make a living. Others have written multiple books or written blogs for years without earning the equivalent of a cup of coffee. I have learned from all of them. Writers write for the joy of it. The one mantra I have heard repeatedly is, “Don’t do it if you don’t enjoy it. The field of writing is too hard and too uncertain to get into if you don’t love the process.”
For now, I will tell you I am willing to be bad at writing to become good at the craft. I’m new. I will make mistakes. Malcomb Gladwell tells us in Outliers that we need to put in our time when we start something new. Ten thousand hours, he suggests. Historically, I take twice as long as my peers to accomplish the same task, which means by my calculations, if I put in 20-30 hours a week, I should be a mediocre writer by my 107th birthday. If you want to wait until my 107th birthday to tell people you follow me, I will still invite you to my birthday party, but if you would invite others to come along, oh the stories we will have to share. Won’t it be a joyful celebration? What are you willing to be bad at before you become good? Please comment below.