Why I Became a Writer

When I started college in 2010, I thought I’d end up as a missionary, a housewife, a teacher, or some combination of the above. I assumed I’d write a little, but I didn’t foresee writing as my main career.

By the time I graduated in 2017, I’d cast aside my missionary, housewife, and especially teaching ambitions, and instead decided to be a writer.

Where did I get the audacity?

What made me think I had what it took to just…do it?

I got some insight into this conundrum the other day. I was flipping through an old notebook when I found a list I’d made just before I graduated.

Four Things

Four things contributed to my current optimistic attitude about my future as a writer.

The first came out of a sad situation. I found out that I couldn’t wear honor cords, even though I have a 3.86 GPA, because I haven’t been at OSU long enough. I only had 57 OSU upper division credits by the end of winter term, and I needed 60.

What I thought was, “There is no honor for the strugglers.“

Then I thought, “Why did I stick with school, even though I had so many strikes against me?” I thought about my physical and mental health problems, about switching schools so often, about homeschooling myself through high school while living 1000 miles from my family, about getting kicked out of my rental 10 days before the end of my first term of college. Why did I do it?

Then I thought, “I did it because I wanted an education.“

Then I thought, “If I want to be a writer, I can find a way to be a writer.”

***

The second thing was the reaction to the linked story collection I wrote for my Advanced Fiction Writing class. My classmates saw the flaws and yet were fascinated by the concept. My teacher thought my ending needed a good revision, but he wrote “outstanding” at the end. I saw in my head the thing it wasn’t, but the thing it could be: a story worth telling.

***

My mom said, “Emily, I did something I maybe shouldn’t have done.” She had a dazed look in her eyes.

“What did you do?”

“I saw your story lying on your desk, and I just read it.”

“This one?” I asked, picking up the first story of my linked collection.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m sorry, I just…wow. You have to be a fiction writer, Emily. You just have it.“

I didn’t care that she’d read the story. I just felt glowy inside. She’s a writer, too. She knows good writing.

***

That was the third thing, and the fourth was when Tim Jensen fist-bumped me for “killing it on the diagramming packet.”

It wasn’t the fist bump, though, it was when he complimented me on my “willingness to try anything.” How I wrote FAIL across my mistake and then just tried it again.

And I thought, wow.

A willingness to try is something.

A willingness to say “FAIL” and try again is something.

A willingness to re-write my ending.

A willingness to scrap the bad parts and write better parts. To just, you know, write. And keep writing. And stuff. That’s something.

Those four incidents were the incidents that made me know I could be a writer, if I wanted to.

Anyway, I found that very interesting and lovely, so I decided to post it here, since I hope to revive my blog a bit in 2025.

A note on the cover photo: WordPress has a feature that automatically makes an AI image based on the text of your post, and I’m always so curious about what it will come up with. This time it came up with a picture of an androgynous-looking writer, so I asked it to revise the image and make the person a female with bluish-gray eyes and brown hair in a bun with a Mennonite head covering. This is what it came up with. We can pretend I look like that while writing, teehee.