The years fall off a lot faster now, as I suppose they are meant to when you get older. There is gray in my beard, and I am more forgetful than I used to be. I also get tired a lot more often. I am in my mid-30s now, and I think about what I thought I would be doing at this point of my life when I was kid. Luckily, I’m not too far off from my younger imagination. At least, my writing journey has brought me to where I am now.
As a former reporter and current teacher, I’ve written a lot of content and work in my life. I plan to write a lot more. In this literacy narrative, or story about my writing journey, I hope to shed a little light on the struggle and triumphs of your average writer. As it relates to my experience, I think it is always important to remember that you have to start somewhere and becoming a better writer takes a lot of time.
The Earliest Years
As a kid, I remember sitting out under a tree at my parents’ house and pondering life as a writer. I wasn’t a writer then, but I was precocious, and I read a lot. A lot, a lot. I weirdly assumed that I would have a beard and longish hair, and I would be working at a community college teaching English, and I would look and feel like a writer. Well, self-fulfilling prophecies have a way of cropping up, and here I am.
And I am tooting my own horn, but I would be dishonest if I did not mention how difficult my journey was to get to where I’m at today.
As a child, I excelled in elementary and middle school. Class president. Highest GPA. Most Accelerated Reader points. You name it.
Then high school hit, and my innate intelligence caught up with me (it was actually because I went to school later than the rest of my class, so had one year of extra growth {Read Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell for more info if you were in the same boat}). I failed just about every class, and I remember my senior-year English teacher standing there as I read the final grades for the class, which she had posted on the wall. D- and I gave her a hug. It was that much of a struggle.
But the years of self-imposed high school struggle would soon turn into consequential adult struggle. My writing journey had just gotten started.
The Midway Point to Now
Cut to me venturing to Northern Michigan to work an internship at a newspaper. I had graduated high school (barely), and then spent two years working at a fast food restaurant. I knew what dead ends looked like, so I steered my life in a different direction, which was extremely difficult. Luckily, nepotism was on my side (so the rich don’t always benefit), but my brother was a news reporter Up North, and I was able to get an unpaid job delivering papers, cold-calling businesses, and writing the one-off article.
Everything was okay, but I was really bad at writing.
Imagine, I hadn’t really done the homework in high school, and I had no plans to go to college. If you are a flight risk, or you have problems with truancy, you fall behind. I was way behind. My brother did the best he could and walked me through AP style and the basic functions of the English language. Meanwhile, that precocious reader inside of me crept back up, luckily. I began to read again at a veracious pace. Throughout high school I read, but I did not study what I was reading. So I had to dig in deep. This is where I read Flannery O’Connor. And then I found Ray Bradbury. And I discovered read Robert E. Howard. This is where all the classics started coming to my attention. I couldn’t stop.
But I continued to struggle in my writing journey.
I moved back downstate and found myself lost in a flood of dead-end jobs. The reporting thing hadn’t panned out even though it taught me a valuable lesson. Little did I know, I just had weak confidence, because I would spend the better part of the next decade writing for newspapers and publishing short stories and articles. Not a huge amount, but a good amount. Regardless, somewhere along the way I got better, and then I had my bachelor’s degree, and then I had my master’s, and then I was back in school getting certified to teach English Language Arts.
Conclusion
What’s the takeaway?
Struggle. Struggle is the takeaway, and I still experience. My writing journey has only been struggle. I teach for a living. I am going to struggle. Sometimes there are students who don’t get it, and sometimes I don’t get it. It’s a huge wheel of self-doubt and imposter syndrome. Yet, I’ve found that throughout the years, no matter if a local pastor calls you and tells you that you are no good, no matter if a person from the career center rips your cover letter apart for no real reason, no matter if people tell you your writing sucks, you just have to struggle through.
For those of you who are at a comfortable place, I am happy for you, and for those of you who are still working at the grindstone hoping to be involved in writing in some way in the future, I am happy for you, too. You will get there, but you just have to get comfortable with the struggle. Even though it’s always there, you need to have the confidence to believe that the struggle will eventually go away and you will persevere.
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