I'm envious. Truly, teeth-gnashingly envious.
Kids these days have it made if they want to be a writer. They can take courses on-line. There are local venues dedicated to the craft, and they learn the important parts of a story in the first grade. I only learned that just last year. And I'm still trying to internalize it.
There are magazines where kids can submit their stories and drawings and see them published before their eighteenth birthday. Paying magazines. Yes, they can draw in an income writing while some of us simmer in our own jealous juices. And they can be a part of writing communities with the stroke of a keyboard, which, by the way, they've mastered while I punch out this essay using two fingers and a hunched-over back.
When I was growing up, I used a typewriter for my stories. Mistakes had to be whited out and typed over. Schools did not emphasize story telling. Instead, I was forced to write sentences using new vocabulary words in pen, and if I made an error I had to start all over. I chose to turn the sentences into a story, so desperate was I to write, but my grade depended on my spelling and usage of the vocabulary words and not my creative efforts.
I had no mentors. No authors to meet and greet at book festivals. I looked up to the characters in my books, not the hard-working person behind the story. We didn't have author visits.
I learned to write by the skin of my teeth, one mistake at a time. I sent stories off in the hopes of instant publication only to discover my work wasn't suitable, wasn't good enough. I studied how to write on my own, using books on the craft, attending writer's conferences, taking the occasional on-line class and coming to terms with the fact that although I was much older, teens far surpassed me in writing skills. They had started a mile ahead from my start line. I had to be quicker, faster, to catch up and finish alongside them.
It's a new age of literature. It seems everyone wants to be a writer, and our youth already has a handsome head start.
My teeth ache from envy-gnashing.
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Ya, well when I went to school we had to use ink-wells and quill pens. White-out hadn’t been invented, and blotter paper was on everyone’s pre-school shopping list. Back then the “Dick and Jane” books were considered good reading. If you had to stay after school, even if you didn’t deserve it and the teacher was just being a … (but I digress) there was no bus to take you home. You had to explain why the car pool your mother has so carefully set up wouldn’t work. School was never canceled for snow. If you couldn’t get a ride, you walked all the way there and back – up hill both ways.
ReplyDeleteOf course you are correct, it is easier today – perhaps too easy. The fundamentals are no longer stressed as before. But, now the kids can write. They can tell the story that that is beating at the Bastille door, screaming for freedom. I so wish I could have been a part of what is now, instead of racing the pale horse to get my stories out.