I write because I have to. There's this creative itch, and if I don't tend to it my family and friends tell me I am hard to live with.
I have written since I started figuring out how stories work, and received my first rejection slip from American Girl magazine when I was still in high school. But watching my father's experience with the academic “publish or perish” model and the life a family friend had carved out as an honest-to-God bestselling author discouraged me from pursuing the writing life. In the first case, I didn't want the aggravation. In the second, I didn't think I had what it took.
Never feeling confident I could make a living writing fiction, I made my living as a geologic map draftsman, an Air Force officer, and a librarian. I continued to write a little bit here and there. Twice, I submitted short pieces that were published by the first magazines I sent them to.1 2 If you’re inclined to read footnotes you’ll see that there is a gap of a dozen years between those two modest publications.
I started submitting short science fiction stories to pulp magazines and in 1995 achieved a rejection slip from an editor I respected greatly and who took the time to jot down some notes on how to improve the story. But life, in the form of my dad’s final illness, intervened. Less than a year after Dad died, my Reserve unit deployed to Italy. Things were going on in the Balkans and we were part of that. Let’s just say I never got back to revising that story.
As if family and work weren’t enough, there were hobbies, some of which seemed to scratch the creative itch. When my daughters were in their teens, they and I performed with a Scottish-themed dance group at the local renaissance festival. I learned to play the pennywhistle and Irish traditional flute. Some of us formed our own ceilidh band until the younger members grew up and moved away.
In their absence, I learned to play the great Highland bagpipes and let the competitive pipe band world scratch my creative itch. The fiction I had been working on disappeared into my home computer's backup drive and did not get restored onto my next computer.
During that same stretch of time, I did a lot of what might be called technical writing for the Air Force; almost every page of that was stamped, top and bottom, with the kind of markings that would land the average person in jail for divulging the contents outside the intended audience.
Meanwhile, the pulps had mostly moved online. Science fiction movies and television had gone mainstream and role-playing games were quite the thing. Fandom had blossomed. Skimming through reviews in Locus Magazine for books to purchase for the library where I worked, I watched the landscape of speculative fiction change. It was no longer the niche market I’d gravitated toward as a nerdy teenager.
I felt guilty, pretty much the whole time, for not having become a professional novelist. Never mind that the field was changing rapidly. Never mind that I had a young family, a civilian job at the library, and an Air Force Reserve commitment that included a lot of travel. Never mind that on September 11, 2001, my daily before-waking-the-rest-of-the-family writing time became Air Force Reserve administrative time.
In retrospect, I am thankful that I did not burn right the heck out. Or maybe I did and am just now climbing out of the abyss.
Imagine my relief when I picked up a copy of Elizabeth Gilbert's Big Magic. Right there in the section on persistence, she tells us why she held onto her day job (actually, jobs) until after her fourth successful book, Eat Pray Love, was published:
I held on to those other sources of income for so long because I never wanted to burden my writing with the responsibility of paying for my life. I knew better than to ask this of my writing, because over the years, I have watched so many other people murder their creativity by demanding that their art pay their bills.3
Thank you, Elizabeth Gilbert! Maybe my adolescent instincts did not serve me so badly after all.
It’s true I could have submitted more fiction and more essays, but that was then. My younger self was just beginning to learn how the world works, how people work.
This is now. All those jobs, those hobbies, and life experience taught me how petroleum companies pull a mystery substance out of the ground and turn it into the lifeblood of modern transportation. I learned how military decisions are made, how the folks at the tip of the spear4 tend to behave in peacetime and the changes they undergo when called upon to do their thing for real. I have played music in front of a crowd and felt the bond when the performance works just right. I know how libraries choose what books to buy, and how to help a small child calm down after a tantrum. Still working on how to coax a good marriage over the difficult bits but we’re getting there.
When I retired, I dug through the fiction on that old backup drive. There wasn’t much worth saving, but I liked a few characters in my dormant novel and thought the novel’s world had possibilities. So, I trashed most of my old stuff and got to work on a new novel.
If I had been looking for a career in science fiction writing I would have done better to begin where I left off, with short fiction. But I didn’t need the money; I just needed to find out once and for all if I could write a dang book.
I could. It took many, many drafts, a handful of beta readers, and professional editing to get the manuscript for Spider’s Wyrd to a place where I couldn’t see anything more to fix. Now that I have found a publisher and landed a book contract, yet another editor is combing through the manuscript with fresh eyes as I write this. I’m sure she will find plenty of things that need attention.
While I wait for her notes, I might as well get to work on a short story.
Bengtson, Adrienne Miles. "Opportunities," LADYCOM: the Military Lifestyle Magazine, United States edition, February 1983, pp. 66-67, 79.
Bengtson, Adrienne. "It Only Takes a Week," Spin-Off: the Magazine for Handspinners, Winter 1995, pp. 56-57. https://spinoff.zinioapps.com/spin-off/console-5961-184636-i464145
Gilbert, Elizabeth. Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear. New York, Riverhead Books, 2013, pp. 152-153.
“at the tip of the spear” refers to people who personally engage in armed combat—fighter pilots, infantry, and so forth. Emphasis on the term “people.”
Spoiler alert: I was never at the tip of the spear, but I worked closely with fighter pilots who were. One of the things I am happiest about in my career is that all the pilots I briefed came back alive.
Excellent post! I am glad the tip-of-the-spear people you worked with had you at their back and all came back alive.
"There's this creative itch, and if I don't tend to it my family and friends tell me I am hard to live with."
Fact check: True.