A Word Lover’s Origin Story

When I was a child, I read every Judy Blume and Beverly Cleary novel I could get my hands on. I rejoiced on days when the Scholastic Book Fair came to my elementary school. I read at the dinner table. I reorganized my bookshelves often, opting to submerge myself in words while other children played outside and perfected Atari games.

I was that kid in junior high who relished diagramming sentences and didn’t flinch when we were forced to memorize all the prepositions in alphabetical order, as if that would somehow make us better writers. When my eighth grade English teacher introduced the dreaded five-paragraph essay and enforced her predetermined sentence variation requirements, I complied without question, even though she treated essays like a fixed math problem with one “right” answer and forbid the use of “I” in our work; it was taboo to have opinions.

During my first week of high school, my ninth grade English teacher said, “Forget everything you’ve ever learned about writing.” He set us free to make arguments on the page without restrictions on sentence types or a specific number of paragraphs. It was revelatory. Around that time, I connected my love of reading with my love of writing. It took an inordinately long time and an enormous amount of self-imposed work, however, to reach my current trajectory.

I am a lifelong learner, and in midlife I have substantial experience and skills I never imagined possible when my friends and I sat in that windowless freshmen classroom, marking off the days until the Rose Bowl Depeche Mode concert on my teacher’s blackboard. In hindsight, it was inevitable I would become an English major, receiving a bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Irvine, but on the last day of my undergraduate career, I had no solid plans, aside from purchasing an alumni sweatshirt. At twenty two, I wrote in my journal, “I just want to be a writer.” Then I didn’t write. I didn’t consider it a viable option.

To remain a student, I attended California State University, Long Beach, where I studied for two years to become a high school English teacher. Between 2000 and 2002, I taught ninth, eleventh, and twelfth grade literature and writing, ensuring I had zero time to read and write for pleasure—or date anyone—and the stress of disciplining teenagers when I still looked like one likely shaved off a couple years of my life.

So I became an editor, the other career option I’d considered in the late nineties. After I quit teaching, I edited law textbooks and interviewed attorneys for a newsletter. Then I managed a data center association magazine. Next, I edited an electronics manufacturing magazine for sixteen years, most recently as the chief content officer.

Simultaneously, beginning in 2007, I mustered the courage to write personal and craft essays, memoir, and, more recently, fiction, while also providing constructive feedback on other writers’ multi-genre work, cultivating a nourishing community. After a handful of writing workshops through UCI Extension and Gotham Writers Workshop, I found a mentor in author Shawna Kenney through UCLA Extension in her personal essay class. After a ten-week class on campus, she invited me to join a critique group. I spent four eight-week sessions in her private workshop, where I compiled essays that would turn into a draft of a collection. I latched onto the workshop environment, listening to constructive criticism, applying it to improve my abilities as both a writer and an editor, offering notes in a safe space of supportive, like-minded, creative people.

As the editor of the anthology BOOK LOVERS, published by Seal Press, Shawna accepted one of my essays for my first official publication. Seeing it in print in a real book and participating in a series of readings in Northern and Southern California was the push I needed to submit my work elsewhere and continue writing outside the workshop environment with no deadlines. I continued to trade pieces with trusted readers as I worked toward completing my manuscript, and for six years, I edited a fellow writer’s television pilots and screenplays, once attending a table read with professional actors, where I gave advice along with seasoned filmmakers.

For seven months in 2014, with concentrated, consistent work, I completed a draft of my essay collection. After a few revisions over the next year and a half, I declared I was finished. It was a feat to be celebrated, but the manuscript was nowhere near ready, and I have since learned it’s only done when it’s published.

I queried agents, with some interest, but on a gut level, I knew the manuscript was missing something—or had too much of something. (Both were true.) So, I sought a second mentor and found him when a friend suggested the online class Write Your Story at CreativeLive, taught by author Joshua Mohr. His lectures were another revelation. During his book tour for his first memoir, SIRENS, I attended his three-hour, in-person master class and knew immediately I wanted to work with him. We spent eight weeks one-on-one in 2017 revising my collection, molding it into an improved, cohesive memoir with fewer pages, more structure, and deeper emotional resonance. His invaluable notes were all delivered via video chats. We moved the middle of the book to the beginning, and everything extraneous began to fall away. A friend who also worked with Josh said, “He has magic glasses,” and I borrowed them to catch a glimpse of a 3-D stereogram of jumbled, colored triangles morphing into a previously hidden, suddenly recognizable, standout image. Once I saw the big picture, I couldn’t unsee it. His approach changed my writing life forever. That summer, I wrote and revised like a woman on fire, thinking, “What would Josh do?” whenever I hit a snag.

Then I thought, again, “I am done with my manuscript!” (I should have known better.) I even posted a photo of a printed copy on social media, while continuing to query agents, rewriting a book proposal and query letter innumerable times to meet disparate requirements.

In the meantime, I published personal and craft essays in multiple journals, and in early 2017, I published an essay in THE WASHINGTON POST that was republished in a number of global outlets, including in a Sunday print edition of THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD. The piece garnered supportive private and public messages and forgettable comments under the original post. I experienced a dopamine surge—and heightened anxiety—waking up every morning to new attention. “This is it! I have arrived,” I thought. But, after only a week, I was once again alone with the blank page. So it goes.

By 2021, my manuscript revision count numbered somewhere in the double-digits. I had overhauled the ending nearly as much as I’d colored my hair. I reached out to a third mentor after reading BEFORE AND AFTER THE BOOK DEAL. Courtney Maum read my first chapter and query letter, sent an extensive assessment, and followed up with an edifying phone call. Fresh eyes served, yet again, as a tremendous boost. I changed the title, made the first chapter the second chapter, wrote a new first chapter, and revised my query letter based on her insight about what agents look for beyond what’s listed on their websites.

After querying oodles of agents, I researched independent presses and am still submitting to them. Two submissions were “in-progress” for over a year! In their recent rejection, one publisher apologized for the lengthy process, stating I’d almost made their long list, encouraging me to “keep going.” The other one said they loved everything but my first chapter, which was the one I’d most recently added. So I cut it. They said my memoir was “compulsively readable.” I’m getting closer.

Now I know my “finished” manuscript isn’t finished; it’s on hiatus. I have fully embraced the process. The trick, another writer friend said, is to work on the next project while waiting. In workshops, I often said, “I could never write fiction,” even though I love reading novels, but once I attended an inspiring and practical Maria Semple lecture series at the Hugo House focused on the imperative elements of narrative, I changed my mind.

In the beginning of the pandemic, I wrote 100,000 words of a novel until I figured out the story I was trying to tell and returned to page one. If someone would have told me in 2007 when I signed up for my first online creative writing class that I would cast aside 100,000 words to start a novel from scratch without second-guessing why that was important, I never would have believed it.

Working with outstanding editors and fellow writers over the years, I have become a better editor and writer myself, and I will never stop refining my craft. I have learned cutting precious but superfluous words is liberating; every adept writer and editor needs other capable readers to guide them; interminable perseverance is a required trait; one can’t control the outcome, only the journey.

I’ve been on a similar journey as you. I understand your triumphs and travails, but every writer’s process and timeline are unique. I will meet you where you are and help you reach the next level. Collaboration is key.