On Finding You’ve Become the One Thing You Always Wanted to Be

It’s strange, waking up one day and realizing you are just a step or two away from realizing the biggest goal of your life to date. Overwhelming. Surreal.

That was me this morning.

For eight months, I’ve been working on a novel. It will be finished in another month or so – approximately the amount of time it takes to birth a baby. Seems fitting. Creation in nine months is what we do as humans.

I don’t quite know how to explain what it’s like to write a novel. In a way, it just kind of happened. That probably makes it sound easier than it is. Although my fingers are busy for a lot of it, most of the work happens long before I touch the keyboard. The characters live in my imagination, and it feels a bit as though I watch their lives playing out on a movie screen. I capture what happens – the seen as well as the unseen, because I’m privy to their thoughts. It’s like being a silent, invisible observer in another world. Maybe my experience of writing a novel isn’t like other writers’. I’m not really sure. I mean, I’ve read a lot of books on the craft of writing, but everything they had to say seemed to fly out the window when I actually began to write. Whether my journey is typical or not, though, I’ve made it to the home stretch.

I’ve written a novel. 76,000 words. 268 pages. Even looking at the resulting stack of paper, it’s still hard to believe. But it’s real.

It’s the thing I’ve always wanted to do. The only thing.

I’ve spent my life longing for the day when I’d meet someone new, they’d ask me what I do, and I’d say “I’m a writer,” and not feel like a fraud. With 76,000 words printed out in front of me, saying I’m a writer finally feels like a fair claim.

I wonder sometimes what made me a writer. Maybe it was that I was an only child, and I spent my growing up years reading books and acting out stories with my Barbies. Most of the time, I had only my own imagination to entertain me. My Barbies were never really Barbie, you understand. And Heaven forbid they had the name “Barbie.” They were pioneers on the Oregon Trail. They were English orphan girls forced into servitude by their unfortunate circumstances. They were the daughters of white settlers taken captive by Indians. They had some serious adventures, let me tell you.

Or maybe it’s in my genes. To my knowledge, there are no known writers in my family, but that doesn’t mean that someone along the line wasn’t a storyteller at heart. I already see the same imaginative traits in L, who at 21 months old narrates aloud as she plays. You can hear her imagination churning in there, making up stories.

I wrote my first real story of any length in fourth grade. I was nine. The main character was the (imagined) nine-year-old daughter of Paul Revere, and in my story, she was the one who made the famous nighttime ride to warn people that the Redcoats were coming. I think the story was inspired by Longfellow’s poem, Paul Revere‘s Ride, which was in an old book of poetry on my grandmother’s shelf. I’d read it many times, but of course, I couldn’t deeply identify with the character of Paul Revere. A courageous young girl, on the other hand? That I could wrap my imagination around.

I give my mom credit for making sure literature was a part of my childhood. Thanks to her, I read and loved the Little House books, The Secret Garden and A Little Princess, The Diary of Anne Frank, The Boxcar Children, Freckles and A Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton Porter, what seemed like a thousand Nancy Drew mysteries, and everything in print by L.M. Montgomery (the author of Anne of Green Gables), to name just some. She also made sure I watched movies she considered worthwhile. Movies with strong female characters like The Sound of Music, Dr. Zhivago, Gone with the Wind, and even Pollyanna. Through literature and film, she gave me tools which stirred my imagination and taught me that I could make up stories of my own.

And like Anne Shirley of Anne of Green Gables, I was captivated by poems that told stories, like the aforementioned Longfellow.

Oddly enough, I was never much of a journaler. Why not? Simply, my pen could never keep up with my brain. I could never get my thoughts down fast enough. I was always scratching things out and re-writing them another way. But the moment my fingers first touched a keyboard, all that changed. Writing became faster and more malleable.

So here I am, halfway through my thirty-eighth year and about to birth my first novel. It’s the most satisfying thing I’ve ever done aside from bringing L into the world. And almost as terrifying.

To be frank, with you as well as with myself, fear is what kept me from doing it sooner. Fear of failure. Fear of finding out I’m not good enough. But suddenly, sometime in the last year, I simply stopped being afraid. Or rather, the desire finally became more powerful than the fear.

What changed? I’m not sure I can articulate it, other than to say that something in me was tired of not doing the one thing God seems to have created me to do (other than to be a wife and mom, that is). Maybe it’s my age. As we get older, success looks different. It looks less like fame and fortune and more like getting off the sidelines and chasing dreams. Maybe it was becoming a mother. Birthing a human being tends to make everything else seem less intimidating. Maybe it was multiple things in tandem. Whatever it was, I’m grateful.

If a traditional publisher never prints my novel, that’s okay. Because it’s the doing that matters. The living out of my passion. Plus, we live in a world of self-publishing opportunities, which wasn’t the case even half a decade ago. I don’t need a publisher, per se. If I choose, I can publish my book on my own. And even if only ten people ever read it, if it does something to encourage even one of them, that will be enough.

When we honor the gifts and talents we’ve been given, pursue the passions that are rooted deep within, God doesn’t guarantee us fame or money or success. But he does promise us something deeper. Emily Freeman articulates it well in her book, A Million Little Ways. She says that when we do what we were uniquely created to do, we get to participate in the act of Creation. We are doing something that is ultimately holy, because whatever it is that fuels us, it’s there because we are the children of God. It’s a tall order in a way, a lofty thing to believe about ourselves. But writing this novel – yes, it’s felt like that.

So – what about you? What’s the one thing you’ve always wanted to be, and what are you doing to make it happen?

Blessings,

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