Leaning In
You’ve likely heard the stories of actors, models, and musicians being discovered, right?
They’re going about their business working in restaurants, street fairs, and munitions factories, then suddenly an agent or photographer finds them, plucks them from the muck, and makes them a star.
It’s not quite the same for writers. We toil in all kinds of jobs, often leading double lives doing so, sending our stories away begging agents and publishers to notice us, and often get nothing in return.
Or we try to amass a social media following to build a name, only to get sucked into the vortex of nothingness.
It’s not like the old days when writers were writers, pecking away at their typewriters working for newspapers and magazines by day, then writing novels by night and suddenly becoming overnight sensations.
Like F. Scott Fitzgerald, when he wrote This Side of Paradise in 1920.
Fitzgerald was my first literary love. In high school freshman English, my favorite English teacher of all time, Mrs. C—, introduced us to The Great Gatsby, and while it was a snore for many of my classmates, I was mesmerized.
I wanted to live in that world. I wanted to write like Fitzgerald.
And so, I did.
It was around that time when I began leaning into creative writing; when I would write in between classes or on the bus because I wanted to, not because of an assignment.
I wrote a story in Mrs. C—‘s class about drug dealing cats that she suggested I submit to the high school literary magazine. I turned in stories that she read to the rest of our class, me sitting quietly, both shocked and honored.
At the end of the school year, Mrs. C— autographed my yearbook and said to keep writing, that my prose reminded her of … F. Scott Fitzgerald.
And that was it—that was when I was discovered. It wasn’t an agent or a publisher or a blog or a million followers on Instagram. It was my favorite teacher who saw something in me back then.
She’s the person I thank to this day and beyond for igniting the literature and writing passion. Thank you, Mrs. C—, for seeing me. You’ll always have a place in my shrine.
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F. Scott Fitzgerald Photo by Getty Images, from Artful Living
