Before I started writing, I imagined published writers were folks who could leap tall literary buildings in single bounds, and I knew that wasn’t me. I’ve written here before that the history of my writing started with a brown paper lunch bag – but that’s really just the start of my putting words on paper. The fact is I was such a big reader as a child that I won a contest at my local library for reading the most books – and that love of reading is what made me a writer.
The brown paper lunch bag episode saved me from my own cowardice, but I wouldn’t have been at that class without the support of my husband Mac. So here’s the true story of how I moved from non-writer reader to writer-reader, or as true as I can remember it, anyway.
I was working as a lawyer, like the Four Ms. Bradwells, because I’d gone to law school. I’d gone to law school because I’d done well on the LSAT, which I’d taken because my dad had suggested it and I hadn’t known what else to do. I’d dreamed as a girl that I would be a novelist, but English was my weakness. (Really, what does that dang bird on the line at the end of chapter three mean?) My SAT math score was 130 points higher than my verbal one. A novelist? I might as well be dreaming of being Super Girl.
So I was living a good, imaginable life that was not my dream, and I was working hard because that’s what big-firm lawyers do. And my husband, who’d taught me to work hard, was wondering what manner of monster he’d created; he was the one coming home every evening in time to see the nanny off.
Then I come home from work late one night and Mac pours me a glass of wine and asks me if being a merger and acquisition lawyer is really what I want to do with the rest of my life.
I say something like, “What else would I do?” But he twists my arm just a little. He asks, “If you could be anything in the world – anything, never mind whether you think you coud do it or not – what would it be?”
Maybe it’s the wine or maybe it’s the late hour and the long day at a job that isn’t my dream, but I think it’s the fact that I know this guy loves everything about me even thought I’m a bit of a slob and can never find my keys that allows me to admit my crazy dream. If I could be anything, I would be a novelist. “But like that’s going to happen, ha, ha,” I say.
He doesn’t laugh. He says, without any hesitation, “Well, how will you know if you can do it or not if you don’t give it a try?”
I’m pretty sure that’s a direct quote.
He also says something like, “Do you want your tombstone to read ‘She wrote a great indenture’?”
(An indenture, in case you don’t know, is a debt document of sorts, and not generally a page-turner.)
The other things I’ve said here before about the importance of persistence and how my writing friends help me keep going when it gets tough – which it does even still – are all true. You really do have to believe in yourself long beyond when a reasonable person would cease to do so.
But what really allowed me to start writing was the realization that the bigger failure than writing and never getting published was never trying to write.
C.S. Lewis once said, “We read to know that we are not alone.” It’s a funny thing to think that a solo activity connects us in ways that little else does. But I know reading has made me feel understood, and helped me understand myself in ways that nothing else does. I hope that my novels will leave you feeling understood, too. And I appreciate all the precious time you commit to reading. Without readers, there would be no books. – Meg