My Writing Journey: Part 1

Remember when I had a TikTok? Yeah, me neither…BUT apparently I did, and sometimes I would talk about writing.

Most of the time I gave quick-and-easy advice, stuff like how to read like a writer, how to create believable characters, and even free story ideas.

I noticed that lots of TikTokers offer writing advice, and plenty of it is useful, interesting, and even inspiring. However, I didn’t see many authors on there giving publishing advice. In fact, most of the writers I saw on TikTok have never even published a book! 🤦🏼‍♂️

Writing great stories is wonderful and fulfilling, but sometimes you want to go the next step, so that’s what I’d like to delve into here. I’m not going to list bullet-point tips about how to hack the traditional publishing industry or generic advice about self-pub; I’m simply going to tell the tale of my experiences going from someone who likes writing to becoming an author.

Now I’m aware that every writer has their own journey, so it might not seem that exciting or original for me to share mine, but I’ll try to make it worth your while. I’m an author and a teacher, after all, so if nothing else you’ll get (a) an interesting story and (b) some valuable lessons.

For the sake of brevity, I’ll focus on the five-year span when I started writing my first book until I finally had it published and in readers’ hands. Like most of you, I had really been writing for decades by that point, sometimes for school, sometimes to scratch my own creative itch. I even had a few essays and poems published when I was in college, in the school literary magazine and in an academic journal. This was something new, something different, something hard and confusing and upsetting, but ultimately gratifying in a way that few other undertakings are.

Part 1: The Dream

Like most great achievements, my story begins with a dream. No, literally–I had a very weird dream about ten years ago, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it after I woke up.

I dreamed that I was at an empty playground around dusk, but I could hear a baby crying somewhere nearby. I searched the area, but there was no sign of any, infant or otherwise.

I stopped near the foot a sliding board, perplexed; the crying was louder than ever. In fact, it seemed to be coming from…below me.

So I started digging through the mulch and hard-packed dirt with my bare hands, and I found, nestled in a hole, a swaddled infant. I picked it up and it let out a full-throated scream.

Then I woke up. I was shook. I had no idea what that dream was about, but the shock tingled across my skin for a long time before I could fall back to sleep. I wrote down all the details I could remember, hoping to put it out of my mind.

But for days afterward, I kept coming back to that dream. What did it mean? Why would someone bury a live baby? What would I have done with the it if the dream continued?

Then the craziest question came to me: What could have happened to make that situation even worse? THAT’S the seed for a great story. That’s when it went from a shocking dream to the beginnings of a plot. That was the first thread that took a idea — a vivid image, some compelling action, an intense emotion — and started weaving it into a story.

I won’t bore you with the slow drudgery of crafting a full-blown narrative (aka the writing process), but suffice it to say that I spent years turning that dream into a 400+ page manuscript. I created a whole cast of characters, crafted various scenes, tied different plot lines together, trashed entire storylines, and rebuilt massive arcs from scratch. I even lost my flashdrive at one point and had to start the whole story over based on my memory and a few scraps I had emailed to people over the years.

The point is, by 2015, I had the (more or less) final version of The Buried Few, my very first book. Except it wasn’t a book yet, and I didn’t have the faintest idea how to turn it into one.

So I set out on the next part of my writer’s journey, flashdrive firmly in hand, with one vague goal in mind: to get my book published.

Whatever that involves…