30 Something

Photo by Militza Molina

“I have something for you that I just had to buy when I saw it.”

I looked up shyly at my second-grade teacher, Mrs. Vauple. She had milky skin with two bright red spots on her cheeks, shoulder-length brown curls, and bangs that strangely didn’t spiral the way the rest of her hair did. She handed me a hardcover book titled Maria Molina and the Days of the Dead. I was surprised to see my name staring at me and blushed. Since the first grade, I would look forward to our weekly trips to the library, which was on the second floor of our school, where we could check out a single book from the shelves papering the walls. Our library was tiny, but the shelves of children’s literature made the library as gargantuan as a galaxy. Loving books as much as I did, I don’t think my teacher could’ve possibly known how much it meant to me to read one with a character bearing my name on the front cover. At 8-years-old I didn’t know I wanted to be a writer; I just knew books felt like a hearth: warm and inviting. It wasn’t until the sixth grade that I started gravitating towards creative writing, making up stories with the best opening sentences I could conceive, eventually losing steam after just a few pages. I finally finished one story and submitted the manuscript to multiple literary agents, however, nobody wanted it and it got rejected by everyone. I spent years after graduating college at 21 contemplating whether I’d missed my opportunity at being an author, wondering if I was too old to keep dreaming about writing a novel. What I know now at 31 is that at the age of 21 I couldn’t have been the writer I am now; I hadn’t experienced enough and I didn’t have the right mindset. I’ve learned not to be self-conscious about age when it comes to starting out. Even the experts have long roads ahead of them.   

After reading Neil Gaiman’s phenomenal novel, The Graveyard Book, whose structure is shaped as a collection of short stories following the life of Nobody Owens, a boy who grows up in a graveyard, I researched the author for any interviews he might’ve done for the book. I found one from Publishers Weekly, which was completed in 2008 shortly after The Graveyard Book was published. Glum about the process of writing, this interview put a huge smile on my face. Gaiman tells the interviewer, Donna Freitas, that he got the idea for his book twenty-three and a half years ago! Inspired by his 18-month-old son, who he watched happily ride his tricycle in a graveyard when there were no parks nearby, he thought he could write a story about a boy who grows up in the graveyard and learns the things that beings in a graveyard would know. This idea was influenced by The Jungle Book. Freitas asks Gaiman if almost twenty-four years is a long time to be thinking about writing a book. He responds, “Well, I started it right away and thought, ‘This is such a good idea, but I need to be a better writer.’ Every now and again I’d pick it up. In 2003, Coraline had been published and also The Wolves in the Walls. I’d had this idea for The Graveyard Book and I thought, ‘I’m not going to be any better a writer so I may as well go ahead and write it.’” I loved that he didn’t give up on his idea and gave himself the time to improve his writing while recognizing that he could wait forever and probably still not be as good as he thought he should be. He also needed to experience parenthood to write the story. His words were a great lesson for me: Understand the process; give yourself time to live and write so that you can put out your best work. If you don’t think patience is key, it took J.K. Rowling five years just to plot the Harry Potter series. Those books had a profound effect on me as it did for countless others in my generation growing up with Harry. She further established the love of reading for me and made writing stories look so fun; she’s been an influence on me ever since I was twelve. And not only me, but to so many aspiring writers—in my English Senior Seminar class alone, about ten out of twelve of my peers, myself included, credited her and Harry Potter in our personal essays for our love of reading and pursuit of writing.

Surprisingly, the experience of childbirth helped my creativity. Pushing my son out into the world was like breaking a dam built from my writing insecurities. After seeing what my body was capable of, going through seven hours of labor and twenty minutes of delivery, I couldn’t tell myself anymore that I wasn’t capable. I had thought of creating a blog in 2017, mere months before finding out I was pregnant, but I didn’t know what direction I wanted to take it in or how I wanted to present my thoughts in a blog post, never having written one. I remember watching the first episode of Black Mirror’s fourth season, “USS Callister,” which came out at the end of 2017, and jumping from my seat at the suspense, wanting to write about the mini movie for my blog. I jotted some thoughts down on a yellow legal pad but didn’t know where to go from there, so I tucked it away in a drawer. I was seven months pregnant when I built my website and published it; the site went live but nothing was living on there. Then I gave birth to my son in April 2018, and everything organically clicked: I returned to myself again and found an urgency and purpose in my writing dreams. Later that year after transitioning to motherhood, navigating the exhausting newborn stage, I published my first piece “F.A.I.L.,” an introduction to who I am, my writing journey, and my setbacks. Creating MyMiseducation gave me an outlet for my writing, one I was desperately searching for after coming to the hard realization that I needed to study more, read more, and write more to write the novel I had always aspired to.

Through researching the craft of writing, I ensconced myself within the pages of William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White’s The Elements of Style and Warriner’s English Composition and Grammar to study language, and Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, an excellent guide on writing well. I learned about the 3-act structure (just one method of shaping a story), from Structuring your Novel: Essential Keys for Writing an Outstanding Story by K.M. Weiland, which finally helped me understand plotting. I was recently advised to read Save the Cat! Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody and I also found that helpful in understanding structure. All of these books rest on my desk for reference. After reigniting my love of reading, I was excited again about coming up with a story idea. Heeding Stephen King’s advice to young writers, I started focusing more on the idea of short stories with the intention of working my way up to a novel whenever I feel that I have a tale necessary of that massive length. I’m proud of my first short fiction, “All Souls’ Day,” that I published on my blog last November. It was a story influenced by something the seller of our new home said when my partner and I first met him. “Every Halloween I set up a haunted house,” he informed us, grinning, “and this year a 12-year-old boy ran out crying.” We all laughed at the image of a preteen running scared out of a haunted house in tears. The scene stayed with me and I used it in my story to introduce my protagonist, Jose Perez. Like Frankenstein, I pieced together the idea for “All Souls’ Day” with the tales of my old high school in Reading, Pennsylvania, Reading Central Catholic High School, which had once been the mansion of William Luden, founder of Luden’s cough drops, and the legend of his son who killed himself in the old mansion. For the soul of the story, I used the memory of visiting my grandmother’s grave with my mother and uncles in Juana Diaz, Puerto Rico, with the intention of restoring her tombstone. We wandered around the cemetery unable to find her, prompting my uncles to ask their mother aloud for some direction. I was around 7 or 8-years-old and had never met my grandmother—my mom had never met her either having lost her mother to ovarian cancer at just six-months-old. I don’t remember how long my uncles implored their mother’s help, I didn’t even remember that I was the first to hear it until my mother told me recently, but I will never forget hearing the sweetest voice of a woman calling my Tio Papo’s name from far away, and looking up at the sky: “Paaapo. Paaapo.” Her voice was a compass and it led us straight to my grandmother’s tomb. My uncles confirmed it was their mother’s voice, which left me thinking that our souls or consciousness must live on after death and this became the catalyst for my story.

I’ve learned a lot about a creative’s journey through podcasts, listening to stand-up comics share their wisdom. The resounding chorus? It takes ten years to become good at stand-up. Unless you’re a prodigy, I agree that this is true and I’d apply this aphorism to any creative field; you have to put time and work into your craft before you become any good. In stand-up comic Ms. Pat’s memoir, Rabbit, she recalls the advice a comic, Double D, gave her about “voice”: “They say it takes ten years to really ‘find your voice’ as a comic,” Ms. Pat narrates. “The first time I heard that expression I was confused as hell. I thought it meant my actual voice. ‘My neighbor says I sound like Moms Mabley,’ I told Double D. But he explained that ‘voice’ is the thing that makes a comic different from everybody else. ‘You know,’ he said. ‘Your point of view.’” I’m still learning my voice, my style; fortunately, when it comes to creativity there’s a freedom in knowing there’s no wrong way of doing it. Your art is whatever you create and it’ll get better the longer you do it. It’s easy to believe that the quicker you produce the faster you’ll gain fame and wealth, but that’s why it’s important to change the definition of success. Real happiness and success comes from creating and shouldn’t be clouded by anything else because that’s when doubt creeps in. In his acceptance speech for Best Song of the Year at the Latin Grammy’s, Puerto Rican artist Residente shared these sage words: “Art wasn’t created to make history or break records. These aren’t the Olympics. Numbers, how many followers you have on Instagram, the hits on YouTube don’t define art. Art is created for us to feel free, it should reflect who we are and help us say what we feel without fear.” Sadly, PC culture aims to eradicate and censor ideas, words, and people that don’t align with their extreme beliefs. This is dangerous for society as it threatens our voice. For artists, it has expedited the need to circumvent the gatekeepers and become independent so that as creators we can continue expressing ourselves authentically and without fear as art is meant to be.

While it’s important to create to maintain one’s balance, I’ve found it’s a challenge balancing creativity with motherhood and work. Both are full-time jobs that require my undivided attention and leave small windows for writing. I know things will get a little easier once my toddler doesn’t need me to be as hands on as he does right now, however, the restrictive schedule of the 9-5 will always be there. This used to make me bitter but I’ve learned to be grateful for the source of income because we all know how much art pays. I know two independent artists from my hometown —talented and prolific musicians who’ve been producing music for years and if numbers actually defined talent they’d have way more followers—and they have to work full time jobs. It’s draining dedicating your time to a job that doesn’t pour back into you the way your true love does; however, I find solace knowing I don’t have to write daily. Once I started writing again it’s been a steady flow of ideas spurred by an urge to create. Whenever I feel like my writing is weak or if I don’t have the next idea, I pick up a book and read. I manage to squeeze writing in any free chance I get, which mostly happens at night after I’ve put my son down to sleep, or if I have a thought during the day I quickly document it in my iPhone notes. I don’t have a strict schedule for my writing, and I don’t always post blogs as consistently as I would like, yet I’m happy and appreciative to have a creative outlet for whatever amount of time I get because writing fills me up. When I was younger, I was uncertain what I wanted to be when I grew up. I remember reading the second book in The Princess Diaries series by Meg Cabot, The Princess Diaries Volume II: Princess in the Spotlight, and chuckling at a scene between Mia Thermopolis and her petulant best friend, Lilly. Hugging her diary to her chest, Mia tells Lilly she has no idea what she wants to be. Lilly, looking at her incredulously, waved her hand in the book’s direction and said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world, “Mia, you’re always writing in your diary! You’re a writer!” Sometimes life is just as simple as that. You don’t have to overthink what your purpose is; just look at your interests and hobbies to find what you already enjoy doing, and keep doing it!  

Amber, Jeannine, and Patricia Williams. Rabbit. HarperCollins, 2017.

Cabot, Meg. The Princess Diaries Volume II: Princess in the Spotlight. HarperTrophy, 2001.