Past Opinion Articles

Article for the week of 9/6/06

So you want to be a writer

By, Puns McKenna

Well at least that's what I want. I've wanted to be a writer for more than half my life. For a long time I wrote only for my own enjoyment, but then that all changed. What changed it, you ask? The death of my father truth be told. Before my Dad died I had plans, big plans. I was going to go to college to study music. My end goal was to become a music instructor. But when he died... Well all of the drive went out of me. I no longer wanted to go into music. I turned to my books for solace and rediscovered my desire to write.
At that point in my life I really felt I had nothing left to lose. So I took a leap of faith and enrolled in a correspondence course for writing. I learned a few new tricks, but on the whole I was simply refreshing my formal education in the English language. By the time I was done with the course, two years after it had begun, I had the confidence to begin putting my words into the market for publication.
And for seven long years I have been writing and submitting. Writing stories, at least to me, is simple. Writing stories for publication is the difficult part. See you have to write something that will grab the reader's attention and hold it throughout the story. To top it all of, you have to write something that the Publisher is willing to risk the money and effort to publish. If you can do all of that, then you have what it takes. The key to success in the writing world is perseverance.
Try, try, try again. Many of us have heard that throughout our youth and it has stuck in our minds. Well it is true. If you keep trying, eventually someone will say yes and publish your work. Me, personally, I've written somewhere on the order of one million words in the last seven years alone. Have I been published yet? Well, yes and no. In 1998 I was involved in a contest, where the prize was publication of the poem. Well I along with a hundred or so others was published.
That, however, does not make me a published author. Not yet at least. But I haven't given up. Sure my life is a little busier now, what with two small children and the myriad of other things I do, but I still have time to write. I make time to write. Writing for me is a passion, a drive. Writing is a desire, not only for myself, but for others as well. See I want to write to entertain others; to offer them the same kind of outlet that I gained from books as a child.
So I'll continue my patience and perseverance. And who knows, maybe one day soon I'll be published.