I never intended to become an author.
True, I did some writing in high school, primarily to alleviate boredom and to avoid having to pay attention in class. I still have some of those writings today, though some of those stories are so cringeworthy that they will never see the light of day again. Teenage me was…not a fantastic writer. Godawful fanfiction was my pastime, and to my horror, some of my current students managed to find my old writing account.
I haven’t wanted to crawl under a rock and hide until the Apocalypse that badly before or since that day.
My first full-length work, an eighty-thousand-word young adult dark fantasy novel, came about due to a combination of frustration and avoidance behavior. How in the world did that happen, you are probably asking. As a teacher, I’m not exactly proud of this tale, but I think it goes to show that a writer or author can come from anywhere or any situation.
While I was still somewhat early in my teaching career, I chose to take some extra graduate courses to increase my pay and for professional development. Some of these courses were fantastic. The one about mass extinctions was fascinating to this amateur paleontologist, and the course regarding how to organize one’s digital files proved to be a godsend when my school district transitioned to being paperless.
The course that spawned Worm Rising was not one of those classes.
The course’s premise was promising, and at the time, I thought it would be helpful to me. It was about self-care for teachers. Great idea, right? The burnout rate in my profession is alarmingly high, and while I wasn’t there yet, I wanted to get ahead of things.
Wow, did I peg things wrong.
From the start, that course was nothing but frustration. The instructor took weeks to score a simple, one-page response. Our project checkpoints went ungraded for months, and were only evaluated on the second-to-last day the class was open. I know that this instructor more than likely had multiple classes, but to go a month without a grade of any kind was annoying at least.
The instructor’s presence on the discussion forum was, well, ‘odd’ would be a polite way to phrase it. Half of her responses to people’s posts didn’t make sense. One of her responses to me didn’t even address what I said, and as best I could tell, didn’t even relate to the course at hand. Several of my classmates noted this as well, including some that had this instructor for a completely different course.
It got worse. So. Much. Worse.
For lots of online graduate courses like this one, part of your grade is an artifact that you put together. Now, ‘artifact’ in this case just means something you can use later in your teaching, like an essay or sample lesson plan. For me, this meant a template for a self-care plan that a new teacher could easily follow. I submitted it and waited two weeks for feedback on what was basically one page of work.
I got about five pages of feedback for my draft. There was only one tiny problem.
Nothing this instructor said in the feedback had anything to do with my project.
And she gave me a ‘C’ for a grade for that checkpoint.
I will be perfectly honest. I saw about a dozen shades of red when I got that grade and saw what was written. I very nearly turned my laptop into the world’s most expensive Frisbee. Rather than give in to boiling frustration, I chose to give myself a little brain break and start writing. I had to put this course on the back burner for a while, or I was going to lose my ever-loving mind.
So, I started writing. What began as a typical haunted castle tale evolved in my mind into a trilogy. I threw myself into the research, the creative process, and the sheer fun of crafting something out of pure will. It was thrilling, and when I was done, I found that I wanted to recreate that experience.
Too bad I completely forgot about the course.
Fast forward four months. I get an email from the graduate program. It stated that I had two weeks left to complete the course.
Yes, you read that right. My mind got so focused on creating a young adult novel that I completely blanked on the fact that I had a college class to finish. At this point, the coursework was only about half done. What’s a girl to do, right?
I’ll tell you what I did. In one of those all-nighters that can only be brought on by either divine inspiration or pure panic, I managed to bang out the most horrific artifact for any course I have ever completed. The only paper that was worse, in my estimation, was the one that was meant to be a final term paper for my Anthropology 1000 class in college. In that case, I completely forgot about said term paper until the literal day it was due.
Dear readers, you may be detecting a bit of a pattern here.
I swore to myself that the artifact from the depths of Erebus would never see the light of day again once it was graded and returned. To this day, it has not. I have not opened that particular file since I submitted it. Oh, and the most aggravating part of this whole ordeal? This fifteen-page paper was graded within an hour. Yes, an hour. The feedback I got was generic at best. I strongly suspect that the artifact was not even read, or that it was checked to see if it satisfied the word count requirement and nothing more.
Was I happy about getting an ‘A’ for that abomination? Yes and no. Yes, in the fact that it was done, but no, for the very reason that my monumental effort at the very end seemed to be wasted. I suppose some of my now-standard writing mentality was creeping in even then…if I’m going to put the time and effort into writing something, I’d at least like people to read it and appreciate it.
I use this tale whenever I have a student who gets discouraged about some task that they feel they cannot do, academic or otherwise. I never set out to become an author. Sometimes, however, frustration is the very key that unlocks something hidden. That course, though it drove me up a wall sideways, kick-started something in me that I never knew was there. I tell my students to take the frustration for what it is…a signpost pointing you down a different path.
The point is not to give up. Just take yourself a detour.
You’ll be amazed at where that road may take you.
This was written by our contributing writer, Hilary Sifling.
Image Source: Pexels, MART PRODUCTION
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