{"id":5396,"date":"2016-04-29T13:09:07","date_gmt":"2016-04-29T20:09:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/?p=5396"},"modified":"2016-04-29T13:09:07","modified_gmt":"2016-04-29T20:09:07","slug":"friends-prompt-249","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/friends-prompt-249\/","title":{"rendered":"Friends . . . Prompt #249"},"content":{"rendered":"

I met a new friend recently. As we emailed back and forth, I felt as though it was destined for our paths to cross.\u00a0 So far, ours is an internet relationship. No, we didn’t hook up via Match.com. Rather, I found Author, Blogger and Ghostwriter, Holly Robinson, while researching another author.<\/p>\n

Today’s writing prompt is inspired by the glorious feeling of making a new friend.<\/p>\n

Writing Prompt:<\/strong> Write about making a new friend.<\/p>\n

Or,<\/strong> write about someone you have known for awhile. A friend you can call night or day. A friendship that is as comfortable as a pair of soft jeans. Someone who has been with you through thick and thin.<\/p>\n

Write about your new, or old, friend.<\/p>\n

Make new friends, but keep the old. One is silver and the other is gold.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Holly<\/a>And now, I’d like you to meet my new friend, because her writing journey might encourage you to keep writing.<\/p>\n

Holly Robinson’s Unofficial Biography<\/p>\n

I never meant to be a writer.\u00a0 I studied biology in college because I either wanted to be a veterinarian or a doctor \u2013 preferably one of those doctors who\u2019s always jetting off to villages in Africa or Tibet to save thousands of lives while wearing one of those khaki vests that\u2019s mostly pockets.\u00a0 But life intervened during my last semester of college, when I had to take one more elective and I chose a class in creative writing with a professor who started out by telling us that writers are born, not made.<\/p>\n

I believed him.\u00a0 I was sure that I couldn\u2019t have been born to be a writer, because I\u2019d never imagined myself as one.\u00a0 In fact, I had never even\u00a0met<\/em>\u00a0a writer.\u00a0 The only thing I knew about most famous writers was that they were unhappy, drank themselves into oblivion and eventually stuck their heads in ovens, shot themselves, or got run over by streetcars.\u00a0 Who would\u00a0want<\/em>\u00a0to be a writer, if that\u2019s what happened to you?<\/p>\n

Yet, from the moment I sat down to write, I became completely absorbed in my work.\u00a0 Unlike my clock-watching sessions trying to learn physiology or organic chemistry, whenever I was writing seven hours could pass like seven minutes.\u00a0 To the horror of my parents, I abandoned the idea of medical school.\u00a0 I promised them that, if I didn\u2019t get to be rich or famous (preferably both) in\u00a0one year<\/em>,\u00a0 I would let common sense rule and find a\u00a0real<\/em>\u00a0career, something that required an advanced degree and letters after my name.\u00a0 Something with a steady paycheck.<\/p>\n

Of course, none of that happened.\u00a0 A year went by.\u00a0 Two.\u00a0 Three.\u00a0 As I became even more engrossed in the writing process, I did what all writers do to support my secret habit:\u00a0 I worked a thousand odd jobs, from proofreading telephone books (really) to construction.\u00a0 Along the way I earned an MFA in creative writing at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.\u00a0 Some of my classmates there were talented, even brilliant writers, but not all of them became successful.\u00a0 In fact, as I look back on it now, I realize that the most successful writers to emerge from my program were the ones who were scarcely noticed at the time.\u00a0 They weren\u2019t necessarily the flashy ones at parties or the award winners.\u00a0 They certainly weren\u2019t the ones who sat around in pubs chatting about the cabins they would build in the woods with the advances from their first novels.\u00a0 No, the success stories were the hard workers, the writers who spent a lot of time alone, churning out rewrites and new pages every week.<\/p>\n

After finishing my MFA, I meandered into journalism, marketing, and teaching jobs.\u00a0 Most were enjoyable, but none were as deeply satisfying as writing on my own.\u00a0 I kept at it, filling up the corners of my life and lots of paper with words and more words.\u00a0 Every now and then I sent something out and got rejected.<\/p>\n

I got married, had children, got divorced, got remarried, had another child.\u00a0 I worked, too.\u00a0 All of that took time.\u00a0 A lot of time.\u00a0 Still, I kept writing:\u00a0 at night after the kids were asleep, on weekends at the playground while my kids were eating sand.\u00a0 Years slipped by with nothing published other than a couple of literary stories and a few newspaper articles, but I was happy.\u00a0 Writing for me had become\u00a0 an escape, not away from my life, but into myself, in a life where family responsibilities and work deadlines tried to jimmy themselves into every free minute.<\/p>\n

And then a funny thing happened:\u00a0 as I navigated the strange process of getting divorced and getting married again, all while trying to stay friends with my ex-husband, I read an essay by Joyce Maynard in Redbook<\/em>\u00a0magazine about being a single mom.\u00a0 And I thought:\u00a0 Hey.\u00a0 I\u2019d like to write something like that.\u00a0 So I did, in response to a literary contest.<\/p>\n

To my surprise, I won an award in the contest.\u00a0 This gave me the courage to pluck the name of an editor off the masthead of\u00a0Ladies\u2019 Home Journal<\/em>\u00a0magazine \u2014 something the writers\u2019 guides tell you never to do \u2013 and send it to her.\u00a0 The editor bought it.<\/p>\n

Note from Marlene:\u00a0 A similar thing happened to me. Won a writing contest, which inspired me to continue writing. You can read the rest of Holly’ story here<\/a>.\u00a0 <\/strong><\/p>\n

To sum up:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Your [writing] success will be determined not by some miracle of genetic inheritance, but by your own persistence.\u00a0 We each find our own paths.\u00a0 Believe in yourself and put in the hours.\u00a0 The rest will follow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I met a new friend recently. As we emailed back and forth, I felt as though it was destined for our paths to cross.\u00a0 So far, ours is an internet relationship. No, we didn’t hook up via Match.com. Rather, I found Author, Blogger and Ghostwriter, Holly Robinson, while researching another author. Today’s writing prompt is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[923],"class_list":["post-5396","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prompts","tag-holly-robinson-author"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p43Dj8-1p2","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5396","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5396"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5396\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5400,"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5396\/revisions\/5400"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5396"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5396"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5396"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}