With the Last Word

Five years ago, I was on my way to graduating college a year early. One of the last classes I needed was something called, "Advanced Fiction Writing," with the professor and acclaimed novelist, Wiley Cash. I had held off taking it because I thought it would make for an easy last class.

I was wrong.

Writing fiction became one of the most difficult things I had ever done. In my soul, I was a poet. I fed off the cadence and subtle turns that science entails. But there was something at the end of fiction writing that I wanted. I want to tell a story and tell it well. I wanted to feel that feeling when you reach the end of a poem and say, "It's finished." 

Little did I know what journey lay ahead of me.

At first, it was just 50 pages. That was what my professor wanted out of me before I left his class. It wasn't required. It wasn't something I would be graded on. It was something he asked me to do outside of class, so I did it. It took every extra moment of my life crafting those first 50 pages. I didn't understand the concept of first drafts. I wanted it to be perfect, every line, just like I did with my poetry. I obsessed over it. I wrote in hallways. I wrote during sorority events. I wrote on the couch of a fraternity house that didn't understand why I was there.

In the time it took me to write those 50 pages, I recovered from a life-altering depressive episode. I quit smoking. I discovered what true love was. I had been accepted into the poetry MFA program of my dreams, with full scholarship. I was a broken thing, but I was putting my pieces back together and those pages were the glue.

Everything changed when the publisher called me. At first, it was incredibly exciting. Then, the changes started to avalanche and everything I had built up in the past few months started to come crumbling down.

Who was I now? Was I an author? Was I a poet? I was terrified, mortally terrified, of what would happen if I went back home to write my novel. I needed graduate school. I needed the financial freedom it would bring me. I was at the edge of my life, only 21 years old, and someone was knocking on my door and asking me to write the best 300 page novel of my life.

And all I had were 50 pages.

I didn't sign, even though my professor kindly let me borrow his agent for the negotiations. I had no idea who I was, let alone these characters I had created in the darkest part of my life. I passed on the poetry program that had offered me a full scholarship to study in Boston. Instead, I did the last thing I had thought I would do before starting those 50 pages: I enrolled in library school to get my Master’s in Library Information Science.

As I spent my time becoming a librarian, I slowly recovered from the pain that first failure to produce a novel created. I continued to write, considered pursuing an MFA again, and found a life in helping others. I threw myself into the charity of librarianship and found that, unlike those first 50 pages, it gave back. I performed stories to children who would cry and laugh and learn to share in my presence. I created bonds with teens who saw that I needed them as much as they needed me, each of us still struggling to find identity, trying to find others who shared our love of books and coding and technology and strong female characters.

In the end, all it really took for me to reach that finish line was finding a community of mentors through SCBWI. These were writers who understood the hardships of publishing and still kept writing anyways. It was exactly what I needed and, for the love of who they were and what they did, I finally found the last words to my novel.

I know my story is not done here. It isn’t done with this novel, or the next. I feel like this is just the beginning. I feel like these past five years of struggling with my novel is what will push me forward, again and again, through each novel after it.

After all, what really made me finish, more than anything else, was the ideas for books I had that would come after it. Five years of ideas, stored up and put aside while I plowed through pages and pages of backstory and world creation and development of my first novel. They waited for me to finish and now I don't know if I'll have the ability to stop the words from flowing through my fingers.

There’s more to come, even after the final word.