K- (i) knew now one who was a creative professional, and neither did my parents. Novelists only existed in movies like Little Women and Finding Forrester. The possibility of making a life doing anything but working for other people was not something any adults around me know how to conceptualize. 

Jeane Kadlec – Heretic

One thing I knew early on – I wanted to be a writer. I wasn’t sure I wanted to write novels, or be more the Harriet the Spy gossip columnist, but there would be writing in my life. Only snafu was, I had no clue how to do it. How to build a life around writing. Some time in college, I found a copy of Madeline L’Engle’s Walking on Water and it was the first book about writing I had ever read. The book was mostly about how she spent her summers in the northeast while writing, but it wasn’t how she built her writing career. What it did talk about was how writing at that point in her life, was about writing with life going on around you. In the margins of a busy family life. 

That book was the closest I had ever come to knowing what writers “did all day.” I knew no professional writers. My family had no creative professionals at all, mostly blue collar factory workers (they made nuts and bolts, literally) construction, seamstresses, and petrochemical plant workers. Not a poet in the posse. So come college graduation, I had a little cash and thought it could spot me while I started a freelance life, but what would I even do? I had no clue, and although I lived in a university town, I had no idea who to ask. And even if I could find someone, what do I even ask them? I took the advice of friends and family, and got a day job. I could write in the margins. Of course, with no direction, that did not go well. The day job, however, did go well, with promotions, etc. 

But I have to wonder, what would it have been like to have a mentor, to have a writing job even? It’s too late to find out, but I can still write in the margins of my life, and I can make the margins bigger and bigger until they are my life, right?

Welcome to my latest exercise in an attempt to reach my goal of being a prolific writer in 2025. So, in addition to writing 1 short story each week (Because Ray Bradbury said you can’t write 52 bad ones – challenge accepted!) I will  post an entry from my Commonplace book and a short note on why the quote spoke to me on that day. I can hear you now – sucky stories and random quotes? Sign me up.

For more information about the blogging challenge, see http://www.a-to-zchallenge.com/)