Beginnings

The story begins in a small New England town where a little girl with a big imagination learns how to put words on paper. From the first moment the girl picks up a pencil, she beholds its magical powers and her eyes light up with wonder. With just a few strokes of her hand, she is able to transfer the words swirling around in her head onto a piece of paper. A story! She can write a story. So she does. Many years later, she is still beholding the wonder of the words swirling around in her head making their way onto paper, only now it is through the magic of computers, not pencils. And the “paper” is sometimes virtual or neatly gathered into a nice cardboard binder with a pretty picture on the front and not the blue-lined medium of her youth. She is a writer.

So began my humble journey. From my imagination to my reality, it all began with a love of words – and the desperate desire to get them out of my head and onto paper. Long before I realized that there was a word for what I was doing – writing – I put pencil to paper and let my imagination have free reign. Whether it was in pictures or words, I felt compelled to put it on paper. Everywhere I went, I carried a notebook and pen. Every place I visited, I hoarded brochures that inspired my imagination. My favorite place to hang out was the local travel agency whose employees indulged my habit of collecting pamphlets advertising trips to faraway places. I was always planning, researching, writing and rewriting. For me.

In the beginning, I wrote for my own pleasure. Even my friends and family had to fight to get a peek at what I was doing. It was a private thing and I didn’t want anyone sharing in it. Perhaps I was afraid that they would get an intimate glimpse into who I really was as a person and wouldn’t like what they saw. Perhaps I was afraid that they would laugh at me because I really didn’t have the talent to write. Or maybe I was just stingy and wanted to keep it all to myself. Whatever the case, I didn’t start out thinking that I was going to publish some day. I just wrote because I was driven by some unknown need to do so. It wasn’t until junior high school, at the encouragement of my English teacher, that I began to realize I had some talent for this. If an English teacher thought I had promise, then surely I must – right?

Still, I kept my writing mostly to myself. My friends and family still had to fight for a peek at what I was working on, even when I was half-heartedly sending out submissions to publishers. I think, in the beginning, I sent them out expecting to be turned down to justify my suspicions that I wasn’t good enough to be published. With that knowledge in hand, I could go back to writing for my own pleasure and stop the nagging of others who thought I should publish what I wrote. For me, then, writing was still a very intimate thing that I wasn’t ready to share with the world for fear of exposing myself to it – and coming up short. After all that time, I was still worried that I wasn’t good enough.

In the beginning, I didn’t have the confidence in myself – as a person or a writer – to pursue the dream in earnest. It did smolder in the back of my mind, a little ember lit by my first feeble attempts at getting published, but it didn’t begin to burn up my misgivings until I’d learned to believe in myself. I realize now that I had lived in something of a cocoon back then and didn’t have enough life experiences behind me to instill the confidence I would need to pursue this career. And one thing I have learned on this journey is that you need a lot of confidence – in yourself as well as what you write – in order to achieve any level of success. If you don’t believe in yourself, who will?

So it begins with a dream. It is sustained with belief. And it is achieved with perseverance. Whether it is an epic tome or just a flash, it all begins with the same things: A blank page, a big imagination, and you.


Margay Leah Justice is the author of Nora's Soul, available on Amazon.com