Evolution Essentials: The Birth of a Writer

I can pinpoint the start of my writing “career” when I was 9 years old. I am not sure if it started in Portuguese, French or English, but I started writing stories when my age only had one digit, and it is hard to believe how fast time flies.

First, I used a pen and paper. There were lots of scratches and rewrites. Then came the typewriter, the computer ancestor, and I trust that many of you reading this never had to use this writing dinosaur, and I am not talking about the electric ones either. I am talking about the ones with ribbons and rollers, where one would get so aggravated because the sheet of paper you rolled into it did not line up straight. You’d have to remove it and all start over. If you made a mistake typing the wrong letter – the metal with the letter engraved would loudly snap onto paper through an ink cloth ribbon, there was no way to delete it or use an eraser without poking a hole onto the paper. Whiteout could be used, but it would still be messy, and you knew exactly where it was as it topographically jumped off the page like a tiny plateau pinpointing your mistake.

Eventually, I wrote on a desktop computer. The printers back then were not as sophisticated, and neither were the computer fonts. You didn’t have the plethora of choices you have now, and when the paper came out, the light ink was very electronic-looking, and you had perforated vertical edges that you had to tear away. Can you imagine? It seems of another century now. And it was.

Historically-speaking, I used a pen or pencil and a paper, whether it was a notebook or not, it didn’t really matter. I had no intent on what to do with my stories. I just had them in my head, and they needed to be birthed.

Academically, I attended a French Lycée and during the 80’s and 90’s, the curricula or the teachers never focused on creative writing, so I always deemed what I was doing as fun, as a secret past time I did at home, when I wasn’t drowning in hours of homework or reading or immersed in some physical educational out-of-a-school activity. I never heard of the term “creative writing” until I got to the United States when I was eighteen.

I entered a Liberal Arts school like a fish out of water, first time alone in my life, in another country and speaking English with a British accent, the English I had learned in French school. Soon enough, I started to become self-conscious about my accent and I tried to mimic the American accent I heard all around me. In hindsight, I wish I had stuck with it, as I learned much later that Americans love accents. An accent can sound exotic, intellectual and mysterious. Evidently, I had missed that memo, so terrified about being noticed.

When I saw Creative Writing being offered as a college course, I signed up. It took me over two years to decide that it should have been my major all along, but I missed the deadline by two weeks, when I could have double-majored. It’s my own fault. I didn’t have the self-confidence I have now. I had seen myself as not good enough throughout – perhaps a mindset stemming from my younger years, plus I told myself that due to the fact that English was my third language, I could never be as good as a native speaker. I know now how misguided that was.

So, I wrote quite a bit during my college years: poetry, plays, essays, short stories. Influenced by others who told me I could never make money with writing, I started my master’s degree in marketing communications two weeks after graduating from my bachelor’s, and I set aside my writing calling.

I was still writing papers, but I had abandoned creative writing, labeling it a thing of the past.

Fast forward to age almost 29 when I was already married and working. My cousin decided to give me a 4-day writer’s workshop on Martha’s Vineyard for my birthday. I told her that it would be a waste of money, because I hadn’t written in years, but maybe it was the artist in her who still saw a glimmer of the writer in me and insisted on it.

I reluctantly went to Nancy Slonim Aronie’s Writing from the Heart workshop in Chilmark, MA, feeling a heaviness, a fluff-less batter of shame, guilt and inadequacy. However, it didn’t take that many minutes into the first day of the workshop for me to realize, it didn’t matter that I had silenced the writer in me years earlier. The words flowed on the paper, as if I had never stopped writing. Poetry, prose, non-fiction and fiction poured out of me, like a freed dam. I didn’t know what to do with it.

After four days of intense writing, Nancy validated me as a writer, and when she autographed her book for me, she added the words “You ARE a writer!” I could have cried in that moment. It’s as if she was recognizing the gift in me and giving me permission to carry on, to continue creating. I told her I didn’t really know how to fit it into my life. She urged me to create a writing group upon returning back home.

My first published collection available here

I posted some flyers at the town library, and pretty soon, the Nomad Writers came to life. I was told that it would be unlikely that a writer’s group would meet more than once or twice a month. I stuck to my guns, because I wanted to be writing once a week. We would meet on Monday nights at 6. There was much turnover for a time, and I slowly figured out how to structure the group, so it would become a safe sacred space, where creative writing was the focal point and where people wouldn’t be permitted to disrespect or put down another person’s writing. It had to be a place where constructive feedback would be given and where writers would feel free to create, evolve and soar. Several people didn’t think it would be possible, but once there was a core group that was committed to show up every single Monday at 6, the Nomads became solid. We respected one another’s work, and the only thing that ended up happening was location changes, thus the name Nomad Writers. For the past 15 years, we have been faithfully meeting. We are a closed group and have been at the same library for a while now, and all of us are published. We have also collectively created two anthologies over the years. We have lost Nomads to cancer or moves. But we remain strong and we keep creating. I know that Monday nights are a special time for creative writing, and thus I am honoring my past 9-year old self who would write stories in an 8^th floor apartment in Lisbon, Portugal.