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The Long and Short of it: On Becoming an Author
By Melina Costello   
Not "rated" by the Author.
Last edited: Wednesday, May 06, 2009
Posted: Saturday, July 14, 2001

The vicissitudes of writing and getting published.

Before Getting Published: Chop Wood And Carry Water

My first bout with creative writing occurred in the first grade during rainy day recess. Sister Rose Ann instructed the class to write an endearing verse on a piece of construction paper for Mother's Day. Stumped for ideas, I copied word for word the verse on a classmate's desktop looming in my peripheral vision. The following Sunday, my father gave a congratulatory speech in a room crammed with relatives, praising the imaginative execution of my Mother's Day verse. It was then I got hooked on the idea I could write, never mind the circumstances. I did not learn the art of guilt until later in life.

Boredom incited a fury to write whole libraries of stories for my classmates throughout the gradeschool years. These were confiscated by vigilant nuns who thoroughly disliked seeing giggling girls huddled on the playground around a sixth-grade "smart aleck" reading aloud her romantic romps with Paul McCartney from a fake diary. Undeterred by these early writing indiscretions—and threats by the nuns—I continued my rabid relationship with the pen. By my sophomore year in high school, I was well into writing dopey philosophical treatises on the meaning of life, editorializing on St. Paul's Letters to the Ephesians, and concocting sonnets to imaginary boyfriends. My parents discovered the latter in my dresser drawer, dumped my entire treasure trove of syllables into the trash, and grounded me for a week.

After Getting Published: Chop Wood And Carry Water

Because I was not allowed to date until I was a halfway through my junior year in high school, the only romance I had was with the high school newspaper. I graduated from the nearly subhuman position of cub reporter in my freshman year when a highly controversial article I had written slipped past the discerning eye of the editor and made it to press. Thus began my rapid initiation through staff delineations until, by senior year, I found myself at the top of the paper heap: editor, with all of its attendant responsibility and lack of glory. By this time, no one realized I could date, and being too proud to wear a sign proclaiming my availability, I continued my love affair with the pen, using the editorial page in the high school paper as a soapbox. My articles became popular for use in Mr. Braun's Senior English class for "how not to write," and were also forums for heated debates in socioeconomics classes. That same year, I was presented the Freedom Foundation Award by a national organization whose impassioned, true blue values were in a similar league with the Boy Scouts of America and Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Before I knew it, I was on local television accepting an award for an article I had written, "How To Bridge The Generation Gap," truly the most atrociously written piece of prose I ever put my name on. I promptly destroyed all printed evidence of the article and can happily say I do not own one shred of evidence implying my authorship.

Now, thirty years (or so) later...Let it never be said that a published writer, who is as impressionable as a soggy slice of Wonder bread lying in a puddle of milk, completely overcomes the haunting influences of her early years as an incipient author. I'll admit it; I still cringe when I replay memories of Mr. Braun's senior class snickering in the halls over one of my editorials, published with my byline in bold type for the whole school to see, including the student body's parents and siblings (surely this embarrassment would become the high point of the day at the family meal); not to mention the future spouses of all my classmates who would one day find my crappy editorials at the bottom of a cedar trunk along with purple and white pompoms and musty-smelling annuals; how I realized, then and now, that I mistook pious ideals and half-witted fervor for plausible prose—and that the future careers of the seniors in Mr. Braun's English class were being meticulously welded by my bungled syntax and compositional sins; that they, not I, would one day write annual reports for megacorporations, become highly touted authors in their own right, travel to Italy and London where they would hobnob with fellow alumni, who would themselves be big house publishers schooled to the nines in how to quickly spot and dispose of a "bad writer."

Epilogue

Having walked blindly into a tangled fate as a writer (my thanks to Sister Rose Ann), I've discovered that one man's epiphany is another man's dreck and ne'er shall the twain meet, however much I wish it, in the highly versatile world of literary offerings. Double-edged swords are plentiful and any writer with a strong survival instinct learns to graciously accept all jeers from well-meaning colleagues, passing acquaintances, and second cousins as good grist for the mill. Only later, after we've chewed our pencils to pieces in the wee morning hours, will we be assailed—only fleetingly, mind you—by a fantasy of lobbing the perfect, mile-high cream pie with an aim as precise as a stealth bomber. Published writers, after all, are only human—and being human means that even Stephen King's Sunday morning toast, when dropped, will hit the floor buttered-side down nine times out of ten.

Still we live, work, and breathe for our written work to get out into the collective mainstream, much the way we gritted our teeth through gradeschool to kick that "C" in history up to a "B," yielding parental nods of pride, complete with happy hand gestures if they were Italian, and a hefty scoop of fudge twirl ice-cream at the neighborhood drugstore. While it is difficult to top these gratifying moments in childhood, little can compare to the thrill of seeing for the first time one's work of prose, wrought by sweat, tears, and near-divorce, gracing the pages of a magazine or, heart throb of all heart throbs, the pages of a book. All imagined crimes against one's cherished writing sensibilities are absolved in a twinkling; the reoccurring nightmare of spotting the dark specter of a nun at a forty-yard distance making a beeline for your sixty pound frame, her rosary beads sounding a rhythmic dirge as she strides furiously across a diminishing plane of asphalt, melts away into a blissful sea of, "Ha ha, you can't get me now because I'm published, got it babe?"

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