Learning

“Develop a passion for learning. If you do, you will never cease to grow.” — Anthony J. D’Angelo

Photo by Unseen Studio on Unsplash

When people ask me when I started to write, I always say I’m a pandemic writer. The summer of 2020 was challenging. My dad was fighting non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma for the second time in ten years, my mother-in-law’s dementia was worsening, my oldest moved nineteen hours away to teach in Houston, and my job went remote.

I started writing memories of my trips into the Boundary Waters during the long, lonely days of the pandemic, and those essays morphed into a love story. The story poured out of me at times. Maybe it was because writing transported me into a world I loved, or maybe it was because writing removed me from the headlines of death and anguish across the globe. Whatever the reason, I continued to write. I learned a bit about editing and edited my own work as best as I could. But, like most new writers, I didn’t think there was much to fix.

I was wrong. So very, very wrong.

When my manuscript got accepted by a local, small press, I was assigned an editor. She shredded my manuscript. I was amenable to the changes and learned a lot through the process. Since then, I’ve spent equal amounts of time learning and writing. There are always things to learn. I’ve read books, listened to podcasts, watched webinars, and have taken three long courses online, including a twenty-four hour course on the structure of a sentence.

I attend two writing groups in person and always come home with a tip or a thought to research. A lot of what I’ve written in the past could be so much better today, but the process of learning and growing has been a good one.

I believe the only way to get better is to write and write again and write again until it’s the best you can do at that moment. When you learn something new, incorporate it into your pieces and continue to grow. I read somewhere that Rebecca Yarros published 20 books before Iron Flame. Sounds about right.

I continue to write every day, and some days are better than others. I’ve learned so much and met so many great people; I wouldn’t change this path for anything.

I’m waiting to hear back about a cover contest short story. I’ll share the results in my April newsletter. I’ve agreed to a local book event in June and am looking forward to that.

I’ve started outlining my next story, and I always love the beginning of the process. Developing characters out of thin air and giving them all sorts of problems to fix is a pretty fun way to spend a day.

Thanks for reading.

Be well,

Amy