A Little Thing We Like to Call . . .

Determination.

Two days ago I blogged about how sometimes writing seems an accidental career. By that, I basically meant it chooses YOU, you don't choose it. No one would choose it. Not really. Too much rejection. Very solitary. You have to have a certain kind of mindset to end up a writer.

Except.

The other side of it, is you must be determined. Persistent. I can't tell you--I really and truly couldn't count--how many writer friends have, at one point or the other, said "I'm packing it in. I can't take it anymore." I was there two years ago. For about a day. I was fighting with my agent over my headshots . . . and it just hit me that I was sick of the whole thing. I wrote him that I was done. Done with writing, with headshots, with rewriting, with all of it. I didn't answer the phone when he called me 500 times in the next few hours. And finally I picked it up and said, "Yeah . . . I'm over my little meltdown already." Eight hundred blog posts, give or take, later, I am still at it.

Okay, so writers don't quit. We doggedly pursue dreams. Fine. But I can go back even further. When I was 21, I wrote a poem. The first line was . . .

My grandmother has hate tattoos carved into her arm.

It was about the Holocaust--and about internal family holocausts. By the time the poem was done, I was pretty sure I wanted to be a poet. So I started submitting poems to snooty literary magazines. And at the time, my feminist, apocalyptic sort of poetry wasn't in vogue. Perhaps it's still not. I kept little index cards of each poem's submission adventures. I often got back personal rejections, "We loved your poem, but it's not the type of poetry we publish." I think I sent it to Ms. magazine. Anyway, I had this little tracking system with checkmarks for my rejections. And while THAT poem was going out, I wrote more poems. Soon, it was rather fun. In any given week, I was sending out a half dozen polished poems that even all these years later, I think are actually pretty good. Then I wrote a short story. It combined a specific dialect WITH my poems.

And lo and behold, I got an acceptance letter. From them. Then, like a trickle turning to a stream, four or five of my poems were published--mostly in literary magazines long since folded. But still. There they were . . . in print.

I toyed with writing enough poems for a chapbook, but ultimately turned my attention to writing novels.

And now, when I look back, I realize it wasn't ONLY this inner voice sort of blindly, accidentally leading me to writing. Something inside me was determined to get my words into print. It was the cliche, a fire in my belly. Me . . . who back then was so introverted . . . was determined that this voice find print. Absolutely determined. I almost don't even feel that same way now. Now, I see it as business. Some books get bought, some don't. But back then . . . it was different. I was filled with a sense of purpose.

Thoughts? Thoughts on one word: Determination.