In 1998, I moved to Kansas City from Chicago in search of a new start. In 1999, I enrolled in the graduate writing program at the University of Missouri -- Kansas City. I kept working full time, and it took me four years to complete a two-year program ... four years of nights and weekends spent absorbing a novel a week, my short stories and poetry, detailed analyses of the merits or not of some other writer's work.
Whenever someone asked me why I was doing it, I replied it wasn't for my work, I just wanted the degree.
I lied to myself.
I was afraid I couldn't make it as a writer, and if I told everyone I was going back to school to get better at it, then of course they would expect me to fulfill on that expectation. At the time, I'd been writing since third grade but had only had a few poems published here in there in the sort of chapbooks short on white space and long on printing margins. And also? The writing program itself was quickly shattering my confidence.
Advanced degrees will do that. You might be a big fish in the little pond of high school or even college, but when you get into a masters program, everyone there is paying dearly in money and time to accomplish something -- and they might be better at it than you are.
My ego took a huge beating. I had never undergone a serious writers workshop before -- the kind in which you turn in your short story and then sit there, silent, taking notes, while everyone around you describes what they liked and hated about it. They always started with the encouragement, of course, and I appreciated that, but I was eager and remiss to get to the part that would actually improve the work -- the critiques. And, they were sort of brutal. At that point in my writing career, my skin was translucent, it was so thin. I couldn't even handle criticism of my grammar, let alone my characters or plot. I held it together in class, usually, but the drive home would be clouded by tears. The worst part? The classes were at night, so they always ended at nineish or later and I would go home and be up until midnight contemplating my writerly sins.
Then I'd get up and go to work and if anyone asked, I'd tell them I just wanted to be a better writer, even if it never went anywhere.
And that was a lie.
Last Friday, I was gratified to spend a mind-blowing day with a bunch of truth-tellers at BlogHer Writers '11.
Beginning Thursday night with the opening reception, I talked to writers who were being completely honest with themselves: They wanted to write a book. They wanted to succeed. They were prepared to own that, with all the fear of rejection and potential social humiliation that might come of it. It wasn't a huge group -- around 200 or so -- and I got a chance to talk to probably a third of them over the course of the day. My biggest takeaway?
Stop lying to yourself.
Stop telling yourself you don't really care.
Stop telling yourself you can't handle rejection.
Stop telling yourself you'll only try until a certain date or some other arbitrary deadline.
Stop telling yourself you can only achieve success by one path.
Stop telling yourself it matters to your friends or family if you don't hit it out of the park immediately.
Stop telling yourself you have no platform, nothing to share.
Stop telling yourself the only book you have in you is based on your blog.
Start listening to writers like Kathy Cano-Murillo, Jean Kwok, Ann Napolitano and Dominique Browning who shared their roads to success, bumps and all, and realize it's never painless, it's never easy, and it's always worth it.
Start believing in yourself (a command delivered to me by someone I was supposedly mentoring, ouch, when I fell back into I'm-an-imposter patterns out loud, eek).
Start setting smaller goals: 500 words, one query, one scene outlined. Move forward every week, no matter how tiny that move might feel.
Start surrounding yourself with positive people and other writers.
Start reading everything you can get your hands on and noting what you like or don't like about that writer's style.
Start scheduling time with yourself to work on your craft. Schedule it like it's a meeting or you won't do it.
Start saying "when" instead of "if." Success comes to those who are relentless in their pursuits.
Start telling yourself the truth. In my case, the truth is this: I want to be a published novelist. I wish it were enough for me to be a published anthologist, but it's not. So I'm taking the next steps.
I left on Saturday morning having spent a lot more time alone with my thoughts than I normally do at conferences. On the plane ride home, I took a lot of notes for the next novel and made lists of how I could support the one I'm currently querying. It occurred to me if you had told 1999 Rita walking into UMKC's registrar's office for the first time I'd be doing that on the way home from speaking at a national writing conference, I would've punched you for getting my hopes up. Back then, I was afraid to hope.
Funny how the world works.
