What I Knew from the Start {a Guest Post}

I was three years old when I chose my career: “I’m gonna make books when I grow up, Mommy!”

By age six I’d been accused of plagiarism by a fellow first-grader (bogus charges, I tell you!). I authored my first adventure series as an eight-year-old: the riveting equine saga of mustang Black Thunder and his pinto cohort, Lightning.

Throughout childhood I gulped books like water and exhaled stories. I felt as if to stay my pen would stop my lungs from breathing. Never once in my first eighteen years did I doubt my calling as a writer.

Sage Advice?

When I made the journey from Vermont to Pennsylvania for my orientation weekend at Messiah College, I had a plan. I would major in English, hone my creative writing skills, and fulfill my lifelong dream of becoming a novelist. Easy-peasy.

The weekend included an advisory session with a faculty member of the English department—a stoic, bespectacled man I’d never met. He asked about my choice of major and plans for the future.

When I shared my aspirations of authorship, he smirked. “I’m sorry, but that’s unrealistic,” he said. “Novel writing is survival of the fittest. A very few great, and I mean really great writers make it as novelists, but for people like us it’s just a waste of time and effort. You need to prepare yourself for a feasible occupation. If you like to write, how about journalism?”

I tried to listen as he gave me the hard sell on a new career, but heard little over the sound of my heart ripping in two…

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Read the rest of this post at The Silent Isle, cyber home of the lovely Anna Urquhart. “Had I But Known What I Knew from the Beginning” – a reflection on how we know what we’re made for, and what to do about it when someone tells us no.