May I Have the Keys to the Literary Kingdom, Please?

I have been having an identity crisis and I have no one to blame but myself.

In April of 2008, I attended my first writing conference and the world shifted on its axis. Did you feel it? I don’t see how anyone could have missed it. There was this l-o-n-g moment when the world stopped turning, and when it started up again, everything looked different. Suddenly, I could visualize my dream of becoming a Real Writer. And then the conference I went to last month had the effect of dangling a key just out of a prisoner’s reach. I could see my greatest desire, but even while I was surrounded by scores of supportive writers, I knew the four walls of my self-imposed prison would hem me in once I stepped back into my own reality (self-fulfilling prophecies are remarkably dependable). With great fear and stubborn determination, I soaked up the conference atmosphere like a drunk on a three day bender. I pitched my novel to Kevan Lyon of the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency and then, in a moment of reckless abandon, I accepted Cherry Adair’s “Write the Damn Book” challenge.

Please don’t misunderstand me: I am happy with who I am. I love my family and my life but I want – no, I need – to figure out how to make the transition from hobbyist to professional; to make writing an integral part of every day, not just something I do in my spare time; to stop treating writing like a dirty secret and bring it out into the open.

You know how much I love short stories. They are the perfect venue for the hobbyist writer. On a lazy Saturday afternoon, I can create a first draft and then spend the week toying with the story elements. For longer, meatier short stories, the semantics alone can consume months of Saturdays. All the while, new story ideas are brewing and the creative cycle repeats itself. Aside from NaNoWriMo month (November, for those of you non-WriMos), thus has been the extent of my writing for the past five years: a weekend here, an evening there, but otherwise, just a hobby. Oh, sure, I’d go through periods of binge-writing and have an occasional inspiration to enter a contest, but I always fell back into my usual routine of duty before hobby.

To be fair to myself, I have been a dedicated hobby novelist in the last year, with only a few brief diversions into short stories, but I tried to treat my novel writing like my short story writing and discovered that the two are very different from one another. Very different. My organic, spiral writing method isn't the most effective way to write a novel, but I have learned from successful writers that it can work and, as you may recall from paragraph two, I possess a stubborn determination.

So, while my fellow WriMos are dedicating this month, National Novel Writing Month, to the intoxicating infatuation of developing a new story, I am instead dedicating the month to developing a new writer: me.