BY MEGAN WISEMAN
They say that when you have a major heart surgery, when someone quite literally touches your heart, you may experience a profound change in your life thereafter . . .
My first attempt at writing came mere weeks after my own open heart surgery at the age of 21. The same week that I returned to work, I picked up my pen and a handful of yellow legal pads and never looked back.
I have, in the subsequent decade that has followed, filled several dozen yellow legal pads, broken my word processor with the length of my manuscripts, and ignored any number of friends and family in pursuit of this new passion. Alone.
Alone until recently when, through chance, I happened upon Xchyler Publishing’s steampunk anthology submissions. For two weeks I wrote until I thought my fingers would fall off or my brain would implode. Neither of these things occurred, thankfully, but one equally surprising thing happened: my story was accepted.
Joy! Happiness! And a good deal of trepidation . . .
Trepidation?
For all the writing I’d done, all the mad scribbles commuting on buses, at lunch hours alone, or in the dark recesses of my room, I was untrained, untaught, a fey writer who’d long railed against the advice of friends: Join a writing group, take a class, attend a workshop, they’d cried.
Bah! I was a lone wolf, my own writer. Why do any of these things at all? I knew inviting others into my little writing world would only provide angst, fear, pressure to please others, edit my work, my thoughts, to fit what the Reader might find palatable. I did not want to be taught! I wanted to have “It” or not.
Community. Bah, humbug! Writing is a solitary enterprise, and I was going to make sure it stayed that way.
But here I was now with an accepted work, a total noob, shy to boot, thrust into the center of a room full of other authors—people who knew what they were doing. Pros. The kind of people I should have been communing with, learning from.
I had no craft, just a bunch of ideas and half-completed manuscripts. I had no Art, just a change of heart nine years ago.
And so I fringed, afraid to expose myself for the dabbler I felt I was. Never mind my passion. Never mind the need, absolute need, to write.
Technical terms flew past my ears. (What the heck is a “proof copy”?) Excited chatter over WIP abounded . . . while I stayed silent, fearful of exposing my carefully guarded ideas. Afraid to look like the newcomer I was.
But over the course of days, weeks, I found I was eager to read and respond to Facebook posts because it was fun. I had . . . dare I say? . . . colleagues. Even now, months later, I hesitate to claim such privilege. But, darn it all, what a lovely group of people I’ve found for support.
And with courage has come better writing. Bad habits that I didn’t know I had (and so staunchly defended at first) are being broken. I’m expanding what my brain can do when it has a story to tell. I’ve discovered I have a voice (what is the sound of one hand clapping?). I have even (gasp) let people read my work!
What a waste of nine years.
Cutting to the chase: get thee a community!
We’re all excited about writing. Build from there.
A Wisconsin gal with a Southwest soul, M. K. Wiseman can generally be found wandering happily amongst the pages of the largest book she can get her hands on. She came upon writing rather accidentally, finding that, sometimes, there are stories that simply must be told.
Megan’s short story, “A Clockwork Ballet”, an expansion of Phantom of the Opera, appears in Mechanized Masterpieces: a Steampunk Anthology, released in April of 2013.
She tweets @FaublesFables. Connect on Facebook at www.facebook.com/faublesfables.
