Advice to my 15 year old writer self
I was at sea (no, really, literally) when Gene Weingarten (of The Gene Pool) shared this prompt, cruising the fiords of New Zealand, so this had to wait until I got back home.
Honestly, I never thought I’d write one of these “advice to your younger self” prompts, but here we are.
Dear Much Younger Me,
Yes, you will still remember your English teacher’s comments on one of your seventh grade compositions: “A rip-snorting adventure. Typically wombatty.”
Which might be the last time in a long time that anyone will ever compliment you on your writer’s voice, so it’s well worth remembering.
Maybe if you remember that then we won’t lose our way through learning the craft of writing romances, when we’re equally as interested in adventure.
Yet we still have to learn the craft of writing and because we are really really good at listening to others, we will lose our way.
Don’t worry. We will find our creative core and continue to create no matter what, the same way that our nine and ten year old selves created with watercolour pencils and in making fictional maps.
We have written to escape our world: we longed for piratical adventure, to be among Robin Hood’s band of wealth-redistributing justice seekers, and other thumbers-of-noses at authority and finding romance along the way.
Which is weird, because we also crave security. Maybe it is safer to dream about being bold?
You will burn out on writing novels, on trying to fit into publisher guidelines and trends, and not being able to sell the work your heart wants to write. Know we did manage to sell two books of the heart because they fell within the guidelines.
That we sold to a New York publisher, turns out not to be important after all.
Don’t worry, we will find our way back to words again. (I mean, obviously.)
Until we do find our way back to writing, we will scrapbook and art journal and play with all the supplies. We will fall in love with colour and colour combinations and yet still have to figure out how to make lavender work in an exciting way.
We will make painstaking, careful marks in writing icons, tiny repeated marks that one of our teachers (Effy Wild) calls holy work, and we will finger paint with abandon onto huge canvases. We will find calm and become centred, engrossed in the act of creating.
You will want your art to mean something but in truth the only person your art needs to serve is yourself.
Yes, just you.
Delight in the process, admire the interplay of colour and words (because the words never leave us), feel the truths you uncover sink into your soul. This is your bliss.
Meet the Divine in the marks, in the graphite renderings of birds, in the communion of wind and ocean. (Also, important note: you get seasick. Take something for it before you go!)
Find holy in unholy mess.
Get your vision down in paint and in words.
And keep dreaming.
The time is drawing near to when the fiction will be going live and my authorial voice will be hiding out in the Chat section of this publication. Share this with a friend so you can read along together about Regency misses and sea dragons!