The Day I Finally Called Myself a Writer

I have been an editor for over 20 years. In almost all of that time I’ve also written—extensively. But it wasn’t until I finished my first, as yet unpublished novel last year that I finally felt OK calling myself a writer. 

I mean “writer” in that weighty sense. Sure I write as part of the career I’ve had for decades, but calling oneself a “writer” suggests something so singular and lofty that I never felt comfortable thinking of myself as such, for decades. 

I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was six years old. This notion, this memory, has always been crystal clear to me. Words were just something I had an early facility with. In kindergarten I broke my arm really badly, so I spent a lot of recess time indoors. My teachers gave me a bunch of words on index cards and I’d make sentences out of them. 

In first grade I was advanced enough that I was placed in a combined first and second grade class. I still remember the phonics book we studied from because it was all just easy for me. When my mom moved us from public to parochial school, I remember the trips we’d take to the small school library every week. The library was located in a house next to the campus. Books were organized in shelves lining the living and dining rooms and hallways. This is where I fell in love with Beverly Cleary and the Ramona books. Soon enough I was reading Judy Blume. God I loved Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret. That book was so pivotal for me, as I was reading it at around the time I started my period. Blume’s book opened my eyes to the young woman I was becoming and made it so much less scary. 

This is me when I was in grad school for my library degree (another story for another day). I’m actually writing a paper, but this is what I generally look like when I’m writing.

In high school I remember some friends were really into the V.C. Andrews Flowers in the Attic series, which I then read, of course. I was super grossed out to find that (spoiler alert) incest was at the heart of the books. 

Instead, I found and fell in love with Jane Austen. While everyone was reading Pride and Prejudice, I picked up Persuasion because I loved the title and was so intrigued by it. Captain Wentworth’s letter to Anne at the end… so swoon-worthy! 

As I discovered and fell in love with all sorts of books I never lost sight of the fact that I wanted to write my own one day. In college I majored in English because it was the closest I could get to creative writing at my liberal arts college. Towards senior year I panicked about how I would ever earn enough as a novelist to pay off the crazy student loans that had accrued and were waiting for me after graduation. So I took a journalism class when I was a senior, did really well in it, and applied to journalism school for a master’s degree. Graduating with an English degree, I had no idea what I’d actually do for a living. Journalism gave me a way to write for a living and get a regular paycheck while doing it. 

This is so true!

When I graduated with my master’s in journalism I got a job at People magazine as a news bureau editor. I had grown up reading People magazine because my mom always had copies laying around. It was a pretty big deal to land the job, and I was there for three crazy years during which we covered Gianni Versace’s murder, Princess Diana’s death, and the rise of Leonardo DiCaprio after Titanic came out. One of the weird assignments I got was to find and interview Ivanka Trump backstage at a fashion show that she was modeling in. When I managed to pull that off, I found Donald and Ivana Trump in the front row waiting to cheer on their daughter, and grabbed them for a quick sound bite. Little did I know…

Anyway, when I moved back to Los Angeles from New York—where I went to college and lived for three years when I worked for People—I took a writing class at UCLA Extension. My class was filled with an eclectic mix of aspiring novelists and our instructor was mystery writer Tod Goldberg. When the class ended, a bunch of us decided to form a writing group, which met at my apartment just down the street from The Grove. 

I can’t remember, but I think we met every two weeks, or maybe it was every month. But we did this for a very long time. At one point my then-roommate even joined our group. This kept me writing fairly consistently, but I think back now on some of what I wrote and it was pretty juvenile stuff. 

I needed to grow a little and experience life more. Plus, the demands of my editor day jobs started making it impossible to keep up with writing after-hours. Slowly but surely, I kind of gave up on my writing dreams. 

One of my close friends, also an aspiring writer, followed a similar path of taking UCLA Extension courses. But she stayed her course. She put in a ton of really hard work, and in a matter of years she got her first book deal and published an awesome YA book. Then she wrote another. And another. Then she wrote some middle grade books. And contributed to several compilations. She won a bunch of prestigious residencies and fellowships. Did a bunch of press tours for her books. And she recently sold rights to have one of her novels adapted by Amazon. Wepa!

I saw how hard she worked, and how long it took, and I got discouraged. At some point, I just acknowledge that I would likely never write a book, and never be published. I let my six-year-old dream go. 

Today, this seems so crazy to me. 

This is me in my jammies the morning I “won” NaNoWriMo. I got to download an print a finishers certificate. I believe I cried a little when I accomplished this.

Last October I was scrolling Instagram and one of my favorite people there posted about Preptober. I was like, huh? I had heard of NanoWriMo, which stands for National Novel Writing Month. It takes place every November and the goal is to write 50,000 words of a novel during the month. That seemed impossible to me. No way. Not gonna happen. 

But then I thought, why not? Why not try this NaNoWriMo challenge, don’t tell anyone, and just see what happens. 

Wouldn’t you know it, I wrote a book. I had a story in my head—very loosely based on my mother—that I had wanted to write for years. I just never took the time to commit and do it. But during NaNoWriMo it poured out of me. 

To write, I used a device called a Freewrite. It’s like an old-school, pre-internet word processor, but cooler-looking. I had bought one with some money I made doing a resarch study for UCLA Health (LOL!). The device wasn’t cheap and I couldn’t justify spending anything other than random research study money oh it. 

This is the view of my Freewrite Traveler as I wrote during NaNoWriMo. I love that sometimes the screen saver would be this image of Jane Austen. It was quite motivating! I often would listen to LoFi Girl on YouTube.

It has been the best investment. Writing on my Freewrite every morning, I wasn’t able to edit as I went, nor easily scroll upward to re-read anything. I just wrote with abandon, breaking up my work into sprint sessions. It turns out that I write pretty fast when I have a lot to say. 

Every day’s work was saved to Google Drive, where I left the book alone until I was completely done. When I went in to review and edit my first day’s work I was surprised that what I had written was good. After editing people’s work every day for decades I feel fairly comfortable in my ability to judge quality and skill. My own work was decent! 

Right now I’m in the midst of editing the book. My goal is to finish that up within the month, have a few friends be my test readers, do a final polish, and then find an agent who will take me on and help me get it published. I know that self-publishing is a viable way to market and sell a novel these days, but in my six-year-old dreams my book is published by one of the established houses. I will pursue that route and see where it lands me. 

In my nearly three decade career as a storyteller—telling others’ stories to be sure—I never felt comfortable referring to myself as a writer. Until now. “Winning” NaNoWriMo not only showed me that writing a novel is doable, but that there are several smart ways to break up one’s work into executable bits. I now want to write a novel every year. Once I’m done editing my first book, I will start researching and dreaming up my next, which I hope to pound out during NaNoWriMo this November. 

It’s exciting to think about this, which is crazy to me. If you had told me 15 years ago–that puts me in the midst of denying myself the dream to be a writer–that I would be where I am now, I wouldn’t believe it. 

Granted, I’m not a published writer, yet. But I feel good about my prospects. It’s something about working my ass off, paying tons of dues, and just having honed my wordsmithing skills for so long that has brought me here. I’m excited to see what’s going to happen!