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- Column - From the Trenches - |
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February 9, 2000 In the Beginning Was the WordBy Susan McBride Author of And Then She Was Gone In my case, the beginning came before I was even one year old. Not that I remember it. When my grandmother passed away three years ago, I found a list she'd kept for over three decades titled: Susie's vocabulary, 11 months. It was essentially a handful of pages with about a hundred words I could say at that age, simple things like "dog" and "daddy" and even a three-word syllable like "banana." I had a passion for words way back then, though I didn't even know it. There are photographs in my baby album of my grandfather reading to me. I was crazy about books, even as a little kid. By the fifth grade, I was writing my own novels. I still have all three of them. You would've thought I had figured out that I was born to be a writer, though it seems so clear now when I look back. But that wasn't the case. I didn't know anything except that words came to me with great ease. My siblings considered me the one person in the family they least wanted to spar with verbally. I was never good with my fists - though I did fracture the tibia of a rude boy at the bus stop with a kick when I was a freshman - but I'll admit I usually won against lesser foes when words were the weapon of choice. Still, I didn't get it - not even when I graduated from high school and went off to college. My first choice for undergraduate study was business. Everyone was doing it. My course load consisted of micro and macroeconomics, calculus and biology. Nobody told me I was making a terrible mistake, not even my guidance counselor. Worst of all, I didn't realize what a wrong turn I'd taken until I was so miserable I wanted to drop out. I'd never really liked math and science. I was 19 years old and enduring a car trip to my grandparents' house for Christmas when it hit me like the proverbial ton of bricks. I'd never had an epiphany before then - never had one like it since - but it happened somewhere on the highway between Houston and St. Louis. It was a harsh winter day with blinding snow and ice so thick it bent tree branches and power lines. There were few other vehicles on the road, and my poor mom not only had bad weather conditions to contend with but three teenagers who alternated between fighting and asking: Are we almost there? It was sometime during those interminable hours that lightning struck. Out of nowhere, it came to me: I was going to write a book. So I scrounged up a small pad of paper from my mother's purse and started taking notes right then. Characters appeared then a setting and a sketchy plot. I had imagined an historical romance set near Vicksburg, Mississippi during the Civil War. It took me months to write, but I did it - all 600-plus pages. Entitled, THE THORN OF THE ROSE, it was my first attempt at The Great American Novel. I submitted it to publishers on my own, enclosing each manuscript in red tissue with a silk rose atop it. I actually got a contract offer from a small press that's now defunct. Unfortunately, it was a really bad contract with copyright in their name, for starters. Even at 19, I knew not to sign it, but the offer and all the praise in the rejection letters from the big houses inspired me. (And now I thank God it was never published--the cliché that "practice makes perfect" isn't still around for no reason.) No one comes with instructions at birth detailing one’s destiny and how to achieve it. It's up to each of us to figure it out. And I'd done that. I was a writer, and I was going to be a published author some day. Immediately, I transferred from the business school at the University of Texas in Austin to the highly-ranked Journalism School at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, learning about advertising, marketing and PR while filling my electives with every available creative writing course. Though I would struggle for over a decade to be published - completing nearly a dozen different manuscripts in the process - not once did I question my future. Sometimes it was hard to hang in there. On occasion, it was close to brutal. Like at my grandmother's funeral when a friend's brother asked if I was still writing, and I told him most assuredly, "Yes." He shook his head and said, "Don't you think it's time you gave up?" Give up writing? Only a person without a creative bone in his body could say something so stupid. Strangely enough, instead of wounding me, it made me even more determined to succeed, to prove him wrong. To prove wrong the relative who'd once intimated I was lazy because I held several part-time jobs instead of a "real" one to provide myself time to write. To prove wrong my father who'd begun to doubt me at one point, letting slip the phrase, "If you ever get published," instead of "when." If I'd been born less stubborn, I probably would've caved at some point and taken a job in public relations, my college major, scribbling in a notebook in my spare time. I would've juggled a regular job, marriage and kids, putting their dreams before mine, until it was too late and I could only look back, wishing and wondering "what if" I hadn't stopped trying. I was 34 years old when AND THEN SHE WAS GONE came out last May 1999 - my first published novel, but far from the first manuscript I'd written. It was the culmination of a lot of years of hard work and persistence. It was the result of my never having given up. What I found out in the process was something I'd never trade for anything. I learned about writing, discovering my own voice, my strengths and weaknesses. I learned that talent alone is not the difference between being an "unpub" and an author. Timing and trends and money mean as much if not more these days. And luck. You've got to have at least a little. Even still, you might have a better shot at winning the lottery. Writing is not a profession for wimps. You've got to be resilient. Though the business is changing everyday with the birth of e-books, print-on-demand and the evolution of self-publishing, nothing about it is easy. Being published, while immensely gratifying, merely provides you with a whole new set of problems - but that's another column. In the beginning are words and a love for them. Somewhere in the middle comes the realization that writing is your destiny. What comes next is up to you. Whether you achieve a happy ending or disappointment is in your hands alone. Should you choose to continue to fight the uphill battle, remember that persistence makes all the difference. And nothing makes that more clear than a quote I read somewhere long ago and taped to my printer so I'd never forget it. (By now, I've got it memorized.) It's been attributed to Calvin Coolidge as well as to Anonymous. Honestly, I don't care who said it, I'm just glad someone did. Here it is: "Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent." Got it? Good. Now get back to work. Don't you have a chapter to finish or something? --- In the weeks and months ahead, I plan to explore the challenges of being a writer in this column. I've got plenty of experience in the trenches, and I'll happily share all I've learned and hope it will help. So, if you've got a suggestion or question you'd like me to tackle, I want to hear what it is, though I'll bet I can guess. I've walked in your shoes, and I’m still walking in 'em. And I've also got the worn-out soles to prove it. |
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