When I was, yes, maybe fourteen or so, I wrote a very short novel called The Emerald Chronicles. (Theoretically, it was the first book in a series, but I never finished the second book.) It had a sort of Snow White-ish introduction, involving a beautiful young girl whose mother dies and is tragically replaced with a wicked witch stepmother. The stepmother is determined (for reasons I don’t recall—something to do with magic jewelry) to destroy her new stepdaughter. The girl cuts her long beautiful hair, disguises herself in peasant clothing, and runs away to escape. She stumbles into a crew of lost boys who assume that she is also a boy and accept her as one of them. She eventually falls in love with their ringleader, but is then caught by her wicked stepmother. The girl and the handsome ringleader have to outsmart the witch and save the day.

I could not wait for all of the fame and fortune that I knew would follow me if I could just find a publisher for this book. Certainly, I was the next J.K. Rowling. “Such an incredible writer!” the world would say. “And so young!”

Fortunately, I never found a publisher. (To no one’s surprise but my own.) But for a long time, my idea of success in my writing was tied up with the concept of recognition. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve continued writing, and my writing has come to mean something else to me. I have found that the writing process—without any of the shine that could come with acclaim—brings me a lot of happiness all by itself.

My mom recently surprised me with a copy of Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott. I love books about the writing craft, and Lamott shares her thoughts on this same concept in her introduction: “[P]ublication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do—the actual act of writing—turns out to be the best part.” (Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott, 1994, p. xxvi.) 

She goes on to say, “My writing is like a person to me—the person who, after all these years, still makes sense to me.” (Id. at p. xxvii.)

This is exactly how I feel about my writing. I don’t mean the characters, necessarily, but the writing process. I have a lot of fun with self-publishing, and I love sharing my work with other people. But even if no one else in the world showed a shred of interest in these words I jot down, I know that I would choose writing again and again and again. Sometimes, there are brief deserts in my life where I don’t make time for it the way I want to. But when I come back to it and sit down with my notebook and pen, it always feels like coming back to a friend who understands me.

So while The Emerald Chronicles will never find its way onto anyone’s bookshelf, I’m glad I wrote it and for what it eventually taught me about my real reason for writing.

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