by Patricia Bradley, @PTBradley1
If someone had told me way back in the dark ages when I first picked up pen in hand to write that it would take thirty-two years for me to see a book in print, would I have put the pen down and chosen another way to express my creativity?
Photo credit: Photo by Matt Duncan on Unsplash
We’ll never know, will we? Because I didn’t quit. Of course it helped that I had encouragement along the way, like getting the very first short story I wrote published in Woman’s World. WW went on to buy two more stories, and with that encouragement, I kept plugging away. So the question you might ask is, “What mistakes did you make that you would do differently?”
Several things come to mind, and I don’t think I’m the only writer who has made these choices. And understand they are choices. Here they are:
- I wrote in a vacuum making the same mistakes over and over because I had no one to tell me I was head hopping, telling instead of showing, using passive verbs, using purple prose, and as one editor put it, what I was writing was trite—in other words it was clichéd and stale.
- I didn’t attend writers conferences until late in my journey. With a husband who thought of my writing as a hobby (something I never viewed it as) and therefore not serious enough to warrant shelling out bucks to attend writers conferences, short of a divorce I really had no way to attend. I never contemplated that avenue. But maybe that’s why I chose murder mysteries as my genre…
- I didn’t study enough craft books. Maybe I couldn’t attend a conference, but I could have bought more craft books and studied them. I really don’t know why I didn’t other than I didn’t know which ones to buy other than the Writer’s Digest books. And don’t get me wrong, they were good craft books, but there were others out there I didn’t know about, like Deb Dixon’s, Goal, Motivation, and Conflict.
- I would have found critique partners earlier. It wasn’t until I joined ACFW that I found out about critique partners! My early partners, Johnnie Alexander, Renee Osborn, Rob and Chandra Smith were brutal! But they grew my writing.
- I would not have asked God to teach me patience.
So, what would you change if you could go back to the beginning of your writing career? Would you quit if you knew it would take ten, twenty years? Leave a comment to encourage those just starting out on the journey.
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Carly Smith came by her trust issues honestly. A victim of sex trafficking, she’s been at the mercy of merciless men, ignored by law enforcement officers who should have helped her, and seemingly rejected by her family. She can’t even trust herself to do the right thing. Though she escaped her captors and is working hard on building a new life, the past continues to haunt her when she discovers that the man she couldn’t bring herself to report to police for fear of reliving her captivity is still out there, luring vulnerable girls under the guise of being a modeling agent.
When her own niece is kidnapped, Carly must overcome her fears and come forward with the information she has before it’s too late. When that proves to be not enough, she’ll have to go after the perpetrators herself.
Winner of an Inspirational Readers’ Choice Award in Suspense and a 2018 Carol finalist, Patricia Bradley lives in North Mississippi with her rescue kitty, Suzy. Her romantic suspense books include the Logan Point series and the Memphis Cold Case Novels. She also has written sweet romances for Harlequin Heartwarming available as e-books.