in the beginning
The Big Acceptance!
By Evelyn B. Christensen
Aha! I bet you thought this article was going to be about getting that
important phone call or envelope from your dream agent or publisher.
Wrong. This is about another kind of acceptance altogether. This is
about learning to accept ourselves as the writers we are, each with our
own unique talents, strengths, weaknesses, and interests. This kind of
acceptance can be as long in coming as the other kind, and for some of
us just as difficult to accomplish. If you’re the talented kind of
writer who can write in every genre with wonderful success or if you’re
an author who’s perfectly content with what you write, you don’t need to
read any further. For the rest of us the situation is different.
When we authors come to the world of children’s writing we discover that
the opportunities for writing are immense. There are picture books, easy
readers, chapter books, and novels; for magazines there are articles,
stories, crafts, puzzles, quizzes, activities; spanning either of these
there are choices between fiction and non-fiction; and, of course,
there’s also poetry. I’m sure you can think of even more additions to
the list and sub-categories within the categories.
Not every author can write in all these genres, and not every author
wants to. Some people know exactly what they want to do from the start,
they have the talent to do it, and they spend their time doing just
that. For others of us, we may try one thing for a while, then switch to
something else, then explore a third option, go back and forth between
earlier options as our muse strikes us and as market opportunities
become available, and then try something else new altogether.
It’s good to be open to new possibilities. It strengthens us as writers
when we’re willing to try something different. Sometimes we also
discover how much fun an area can be we’ve never explored before. When I
first started interacting on a children’s writer forum I had written
only educational puzzle books and a few articles for professional
journals. I kept reading posts on the forum about people getting
acceptances from various children’s magazines. It sounded interesting. I
decided to try it, and I liked it!
There may be areas, however, that certain writers know are not for them.
I know, for example, that I will never write a novel. I don’t have the
talent for it. (And I have almost as little talent for writing articles
about writing—this one is just because Jan asked for it!) Other areas
may be ones which hold no interest for the author. You may be a person
who knows for certain you’d never want to write puzzles. I rarely enjoy
doing research, so I know writing non-fiction is not an area for me.
All this is fine. The problem can come when we’re dissatisfied as
authors with what we’re doing. Even the dissatisfaction can be good if
it leads us to do something constructive to improve such as taking a
writing course or joining a critique group. But if we’re already doing
everything we know to improve and we’re feeling dissatisfied, we may
need to take a good hard look at our Self-Acceptance Quotient.*
We need to accept that we have many wonderful talents, even if none of
the picture books we’ve written ever gets published. If we write only
for children’s magazines we need to recognize that writing for
children’s magazines is a wonderful gift we give to the children of the
world, even if we post our good news on our favorite writers’ forum and
almost nobody congratulates us. Not all of us can be J.K. Rowling and
write Harry Potter books, but we can all find joy in our writing.
May that joy be the foundation which underlies our ability to accept
ourselves as the unique, special writers each of us are.
*This word doesn’t have any particular meaning here; I
just had to throw in at least one math word because I’m a math person.
:)
Evelyn B.
Christensen writes for children's magazines and has authored more
than 30 educational and puzzle books.
This page last updated on 01 April 2008
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