I was born in Illinois in 1951, and I learned early what it felt like when people decided what you could do before you had much chance to show them. Ear infections when I was a child caused significant hearing loss, and that affected my speech. People didn’t always understand what that meant. Some simply decided I was backward. Children can be cruel about differences, but adults can be careless too, and after a while I suppose stubbornness became one of the ways I dealt with people expecting less from me than I expected from myself.
Years later, in a high school speech class, I said I wanted to become a published novelist. The class laughed, and I doubt everybody in that room carried the moment home with them, but I did. There are things people say that mean almost nothing to the person saying them and a great deal to the person hearing them. Being laughed at didn’t make the dream disappear. If anything, it gave me another reason not to let it go. I wanted to prove that the girl people had underestimated could do exactly what they thought she couldn’t do.
Wanting to write a book and finishing one are two different things. That is true whether you are sixteen, thirty-six or seventy-six. A book doesn’t care how long you have wanted it. At some point there still has to be a page, and then another page, and then a day when the pages aren’t going well at all. There is no way around that part, and although the dream may feel exciting when you talk about it, the work is usually quieter. You spend time with characters nobody else knows yet. You keep track of things that exist only in your head and on the page. You go back over what you wrote, find something that needs to be changed and keep going because there is still more story waiting for you.
The Sylville Secret is a long novel. It has families, old friendships, a kidnapping, secrets that reach back years, people in Sylville and people far outside it whose lives eventually connect. Kira begins as a fourteen-year-old girl who would rather go fishing than sit through another sermon. Her family knows her as their daughter and sister, but other people know things about her past that she does not. The story keeps widening from one small town into something much larger. Keeping that many people and secrets moving in the same direction isn’t something that happens because a person once announced she wanted to be a novelist. It happens because she returns to the story.
I think people sometimes make writing sound more mysterious than it is. There can be inspiration, of course, and there are scenes that come easily while others fight you, but there is also a lot of sitting with a problem until you find your way through it. A character has to get from one place to another. A clue has to be noticed without being shouted at the reader. Something that happens early has to still make sense hundreds of pages later. Some days you feel clever and other days you wonder how you managed to spell your own name, but both kinds of days count if you keep working.
Age can make people especially hard on themselves. We are used to stories about young success. Somebody publishes a first novel at twenty-two, starts a company at nineteen or seems to have an entire life planned before the rest of us have found the right shoes. Good for them, but their clock isn’t mine. I was born in 1951, and the dream of becoming a novelist started a long time before the finished book existed. The distance between those two things doesn’t embarrass me because a great deal of ordinary life happened in that distance, as it does for most people. I became the person who was eventually able to finish the story.
There is a strange pressure to explain why something took so long, as if a dream that wasn’t completed quickly must have been forgotten. I don’t think that is true. Some dreams stay quiet for years because you can be busy, tired, distracted, responsible for other people or simply unsure how to do the thing you want to do. None of that proves the desire was fake. It proves there were other things in your life. A book is patient in one way because the blank page doesn’t send you a bill for being late. When you come back, it is still blank and still waiting for you to put something there.
Finishing also doesn’t mean the old doubts disappear. If people once made you feel foolish for wanting something, some of that can stay in your head long after the people themselves are gone. A bad day can bring those voices back very quickly. Those old doubts can turn into a voice that says you are too old, you waited too long, nobody will read it and you should have done it years ago. I know what it is to have people doubt me, and I know the temptation to do their work for them by doubting myself. At some point you have to decide whether those voices are going to get a vote.
I wouldn’t tell another writer that determination makes everything easy. That would be nonsense. Determination can be tiring because it makes you return to something you would rather avoid when you know it isn’t finished. It can make you look at a chapter again when you were hoping the chapter would somehow fix itself overnight. But stubbornness has served me fairly well. The same quality that grew out of being underestimated as a child eventually became useful. If somebody tells you often enough that you can’t do something, proving them wrong can keep you moving for quite a while.
There is also a point when proving other people wrong stops being the whole reason. A novel is too much work to finish only for the people who laughed at you. The story itself and the characters have to matter, because by the time a book becomes hundreds of pages long, you have spent too much time with those people to treat them as a high school argument. Kira, the Floyds, Reverend Farley, Douglas Reardon and the rest of Sylville became a world that had to reach its ending. By then I wasn’t writing so I could answer a classroom. I was trying to finish a story I had spent too much time with to abandon.
If there is somebody reading this who has wanted to write for years and keeps thinking the proper time has passed, I can’t tell you whether your book will be published or whether it will become what you imagine. Nobody can promise that. What I can say is that people begin things later than they planned, return to work they put aside and discover that there are still parts of life they haven’t figured out at an age when they once assumed they would know everything. The calendar doesn’t do the work for you, but it doesn’t have to stop you from doing it either.
I still remember that high school speech class and saying I wanted to become a published novelist while people laughed. I don’t know how many of them would remember it now, but the book exists, and I have no need to go back and argue with anybody in that room.