Building Doors
photo courtesy of slworking2
A week ago I got a revise and resubmit from the editor at one of my top choice publishers. It was a long and thorough email which, I hope, means that my chances of acquisition are strong. What is surprising is that the editor was responding to a submission I sent her over a year ago. It may as well be a message from another lifetime on another planet.
Opening the novel to revise feels like opening a door in time. When I submitted the manuscript I had a couple of solid freelance gigs and an adjunct professor position. I felt ‘legitimate’ as a worker and a writer. I lived in an area with a pulsing creative community and everything felt on the right path to where I wanted to be.
Within a few weeks of sending the submission, I found out my husband’s job was moving us to a small woodsy town far enough away it meant I’d lose my jobs and my creative community. A couple of weeks later my son came home from school and wouldn’t return for several months.
In some ways I was lucky. With no work, I had the bandwidth to focus on homeschooling and the move. In other ways, I felt like I was spinning adrift in a cloud of fallout that had once been my life. Then I heard Kwame Alexander speak at a virtual SCBWI conference I was attending.
Kwame Alexander
Alexander is a superstar with 21 books and more awards than I can list, but he talked about the time before he was published. For many years doors were not opening for him so he made his own opportunities. “You’ve got to carve out your own door,” Alexander said.
I had to re-evaluate what I thought made me ‘legitimate’ as a writer. I had to build a new door to where I wanted to be. So I did.
Pandemic made it hard to plug into the small creative community in my new town so I sought out a new virtual community. As I talked craft in these forums I realized how much I enjoy talking craft. A few months later I launched Words Unbound Studio which is a place for me and my writing colleagues (because aren’t we all colleagues?) to share love of the craft. Not only did that give me a way to share my own thoughts it also gave me a way to stay connected to my creative community both live and virtual.
The website grew well and that buoyed me up to take on the second thing I always wanted to do: publish a multi-genre anthology. Heroic Care comes out next week. The journey to that achievement is worth its own post. I’ll write that later.
While doing all that I also opened myself to the new possibilities for how I defined myself as a writer. I defined myself as a young adult and picture book writer but pandemic stress fried my kid-lit mind. I stalled 100 pages into a YA novel and for the first time felt blocked. With no words flowing, I opened myself to an idea I’d been fighting for a year; an idea for an adult novel. Once I allowed it, the first draft poured out in three months followed quickly by a new middle-grade graphic novel and a couple of strong new picture books. I may not have had a ‘legitimate’ writing job but my writing output doubled.
So here I am, revising a novel that now seems like it was written by a different writer. Am I ‘legitimate’ as I would have defined it then (ie. consistent paid writing gigs)? Probably not. But I am absolutely a better writer. The Heroic Care anthology is something I’m extremely proud of. The work I’ve finished this year is stronger, the community I’ve built feels tighter.
In the paid writing world, I’m revising a novel for one publisher and another publisher is looking at the middle-grade graphic novel. I can’t say whether starting to ‘carve out a door’ helped these opportunities to find me, but I do know that what I’ve built this year will help keep me resilient whether these opportunities pan out or not.
What makes me ‘legitimate’ as a writer are doorways I’ve built and they cannot be shaken by whatever life throws at them.
