Missed Opportunities

When I was in high school, even though I knew I wanted to be an author, I didn’t take creative writing. By that point, I had already been writing fiction on my own for almost a decade. I wasn’t an arrogant person– I didn’t think I was pretty or smart, and I knew I wasn’t athletic or popular–but when it came to writing, I thought I had all the answers. I figured those classes were for wannabes and kids looking for an easy A. A few of my friends wrote too, and I assumed we were the only serious writers in that school. I took journalism instead.

In college I was a little bit more humble. I had a few rejections under my belt by then and I figured okay, maybe an intermediate class would help me polish my skills. I actually went to the professor with writing samples to ask if I could skip the intro class (a difficult thing to do as incredibly shy person who was terrified of authority figures). He explained that the spots in the 200-level class were reserved for people who did well in the intro class, so I accepted that I would have to play by the rules and enrolled in the intro class. I ended up making friends with another writer there, and two of the stories I wrote in that class went on to be my first real writing successes, so at the time I decided it had been worthwhile after all.

But that class did a few more things for me as well, things that it took me a few (okay, more than a few) years to really grasp. First, it introduced me to real, honest-to-goodness critiques. Up to that point, my friends had read my stories and had told me they liked them and maybe given me a suggestion or two, but nothing like this. The scenes and stories I wrote were cut to pieces, sometimes with a scalpel, sometimes with a machete, depending on how badly they needed to be reworked. It was nerve-wracking and painful, but I grew more in that class and the novel writing class I took the next semester than I had in all my years of working on my own.

The other thing that intro class introduced me to was the idea of a community of writers. In The Hour I First Believed, Wally Lamb’s narrator, high school English teacher Caelum Quirk, talks about the unpopular kids in the school where he teaches, the “non-jocks, the readers, the gay kids, the ones starting to stew about social injustice.” He describes how high school is for these kids, trying to find their way in the world while being bullied and dismissed. One line in particular caught my eye: “The freaks know where there’s refuge: in the library, the theater program, art class, creative-writing.” The freaks in his novel may have known this, but I didn’t. It never occurred to me that the people in those high school creative writing classes might have been exactly like me. My friends and I didn’t have the market cornered on wanting to be writers. Just because I didn’t know these people, that didn’t mean they weren’t as passionate and sincere in their desire to make their voices heard.

In college I was willing to see my fellow writers as my peers, but there my shyness did me in. I was able to see the community, press my face up against the glass and watch them, but I never felt I belonged to it. I was awkward and uncomfortable and felt like no one cared what I had to say about anything, or, even worse, that they actively disliked me or thought what I had to say was stupid. I wanted my writing to be my voice, but my writing wasn’t there to speak for me when we went out to a bar after a reading, and I was terrified by the idea of reading my writing out loud, which would have connected me to more people than the handful in my classes. So I remained cut off from the world I was only just realizing existed.

In those classes the professor talked about “missed opportunities,” places in our fiction where something unexpected or profound could have happened but didn’t because we, as writers, were lazy, or safe, or not paying close enough attention. It’s taken me this long to realize that this can apply to real life too. I’ve always thought of my life in terms of opportunities I didn’t get–I didn’t get to go to my prom, or spend a semester abroad, or any of a number of other things–as opposed to opportunities I missed because I was lazy, or safe, or not paying close enough attention. Arrogance prevented me from discovering a writing community in high school. Shyness prevented me from putting myself out there and joining the writing community in college. But sometimes, if you’re lucky, another opportunity comes along.

A story in Salon.com a while back led me to an online community of women writers called She Writes, which led me to a writer who in turn led me to a Twitter “twibe” based around the hashtag #MyWANA, which grew out of Kristen’s Lamb’s book We Are Not Alone. I’m almost as awkward and shy online as I am in real life, and I still battle the nagging feeling that no one cares what I have to say, but what tentative steps I have taken to put myself out there in these arenas have been amply rewarded. I try to remember that these are communities of people working towards the same goal, people who have come together to support each other. It’s time for me to stop letting these opportunities pass me by and to take the plunge and join these communities of writers. I encourage you to do the same. Whatever your passion is, there are people out there you can share it with.

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