Chick Chat

CHICK CHAT: What Was the First Serious Writing Project We Ever Completed?

All writers have a starting place–the first time they set down words on paper (or screen) with the intent to have it become an original finished “piece.” So the question we’re asking today is, what was the first serious (and we can each be the judge of what “serious” means) writing project that we ever actually completed?

Lisa Q. Mathews

I’m not exactly sure we can call my 6th-grade magazine publication “serious,” but…it was a (very long) short story with The Little Prince meets Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland vibes: young princess floating around a weird planet. I was thrilled to win first prize and actually be published, though, after all those attempts to be accepted into the Institute of Children’s Literature correspondence-by-mail course (this was the 70s and ICL was located just a few towns over in CT). I suspect they weren’t looking for actual KID authors –just kids’ authors–since I never received a single response to the free aptitude tests offered in the back of all my mom’s magazines. I was truly crushed, waiting at the mailbox like Charlie Brown hoping for a valentine. (I tried to Draw Sparky, too, with the same response rate.)

 Ellen Byron

My first project was a one-act called GRACELAND about two women who show up at the Elvis Presley mansion the night before it’s scheduled to open to the public, each determined to claim the honor of being the first person to step foot inside. My brother and I had watched one of those 7:30 p.m. time filler shows in New York where newscasters did local interest stories, and one was about a woman whose basement was a memorial museum to Elvis. I couldn’t understand that level of fandom and it fascinated me so much I wrote a play about it.

The play put me on the map as a writer. Not only was it performed and published – I still get the occasional royalty check and I wrote the play in 1982 – it was selected for the annual Best Short Plays collection. Kathy Bates was supposed to play Bev in a production at the renowned Actors Theater of Louisville, but she got a film or TV role and had to bow out. The equally iconic Margo Martindale replaced her.

I eventually wrote a companion piece called ASLEEP ON THE WIND, a memory play meant to be performed after GRACELAND, even though it takes place ten years earlier. It will always be one of my favorite things I ever wrote.

Marla Cooper


Back when I was working as an advertising copywriter, I met up with one of my clients for breakfast while on a trip to New York. We sat down, ordered coffee, and she said, “How would you like to write a book?” I had never written a book and the prospect sounded thrilling, even if it was nonfiction. She had signed a contract with Chronicle Books and wanted me to ghostwrite it for her. I felt like kind of a big deal! Her book deal became my book deal by proxy, and I loved writing it! A year later, the editor on the project reached out to me about ghostwriting a nonfiction guide to destination weddings for another client they had just signed a contract with. That led to the inspiration behind the Destination Wedding Mysteries — all from one little breakfast!

Cynthia Kuhn

The first things I ever completed would be the poems and stories I turned in during my undergraduate classes. I had been generating pieces ever since I learned to read and write, before kindergarten. My grandmother was a poet (not published but prolific) who sent me poems in the mail, and my parents read us books all the time, so I was just immediately drawn into the whole world of words. Felt compelled to write things. But they weren’t for anyone outside of my family to see until I took creative writing classes in college and we had to share. I almost passed out the first time we read aloud in class!

 

Leslie Karst

The first serious writing project I ever completed was a short story for a seventh grade English course. Everyone in the class had to submit something for the creative writing compilation (today we’d call it a “zine”) that was to be mimeographed–remember those?–and then given to the entire class at the end of the year.

Being the horse-crazy girl I was, I wrote a story about a winged horse, as I’d recently been reading some book about Pegasus. A few years back, I re-read the story, and it was so embarrassingly bad that I could barely make it to the end. Oy. Not an auspicious start for a writer. In fact, I never wrote any creative fiction again until I was in my mid-twenties.

Jennifer Chow

When I was in elementary school, my local newspaper ran an essay contest. I submitted a creative non-fiction piece that highlighted my experience of racism. It did not get selected. For a while, I wrote for my own pleasure and forgot about publication until the beginning of high school. This was my angsty period, so I wrote a lot of poems. I submitted a few to an organization for young poets and was pleasantly surprised when they decided to publish them. 😊

Patricia Sargeant

The writing project that comes to mind is my letter to the news anchor of a public access radio station. I was in the third grade. Every Friday afternoon, our teacher would have us listen to a news program designed for students. The project was a way to get children interested and engaged in current events. After the program, our teacher would have us write letters to the anchor, expressing our opinion of the topic or how that segment’s issue affected us.

I was in my element. You see, I considered myself to be a budding reporter. “Who? What? When? Where? Why? How? The public has a right to know!”

Anyway, that segment was on school overcrowding. My letter explained how my crowded classroom affected me. I got a certificate for that letter. I was thrilled and it reinforced my desire to become a journalist.

Readers: what was the first writing project you ever completed?

32 thoughts on “CHICK CHAT: What Was the First Serious Writing Project We Ever Completed?”

  1. When I was in 7th or 8th grade, my class was assigned to write short stories to be read by the kids in the primary grades. I wrote a fantasy tale called The Magic Coin.” There was an evil king, I think. That’s about all I remember. My guess is that the project was assigned around the time I was reading The Chronicles of Narnia.

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  2. As a kid, I was fascinated with the Man from U.N.C.L.E. TV show, so much so that I wrote a couple of “novels” by hand in marble-cover copybooks like we used in school. I don’t remember the details, but they were probably pretty bad. I did finish two of them, though. I worked as a tech writer for much of my career and completed a lot of projects during that time. I did not return to fiction until I “retired”, when I wrote the first Natalie McMasters novel, “Stripper!”, in about six months. I tried for a year to find an agent, then gave that up as a bad job and puclished it on Amazon myself. The rest is history!

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  4. I’ve never thought about writing fantasy, but I have thought a lot about sfi fi. I do have a young adult mystery that I started and then got busy with something else.

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  5. So inspiring to hear about these creative projects from the Chicks and others! (And, Cynthia, I’m with you about my first writing class in college. I had major writer’s block because I wanted to write something super impressive!)

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  6. Not sure I remember the “first” (WAY too many years ago!), but I do vividly recall an essay we were assigned in my college freshman English class. It was supposed to be sarcastic or ironic and I do that so well! I wrote about my how OCD my roommate was and unfortunately, the instructor thought it was outstanding so, he read it to the entire class. Who else was in that class, my roommate’s best friend. Ah the next few days were more than a bit tense in our room!

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      1. They did that back in the day. He was reading it as he said, I’m sure it’s ok with the author, too late by then! He did not name me as the author until the end.

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  7. How cool that Margo Martindale was in your play, Ellen! I so love her. In fact, my sister and I just re-watched her bit in “Paris, Je T’Aime” while we were there.

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  8. I think my first “serious” writing project was an essay I wrote about life after the Army, “Invisible Veterans: What Happens When Military Women Become Civilians Again,” an anthology edited by Dr. Kate Hendricks Thomas and Dr. Kyleanne Hunter. I had submitted it for consideration on a whim and when they selected it for publication, I thought, maybe I can so this writing thing!

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  10. I’m a recovered fiction writer. Okay, so maybe that’s claiming too much credit, but I did write some short stories as a kid. One of which got included in a collection for my school when I was in Jr. high. I think it would have been considered a zine. I still have a copy of it around my condo somewhere, I’m sure, but the story itself was hand written or typed since this was long before the days of computers. Or at least computers in my home.

    (As for me writing fiction now, I’ve realized that I am too impatient. I write something, and I’m ready for everyone to tell me how brilliant it is. I don’t have the patient to write something novel length. Or, you know, do the word to make it good.)

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      1. Thank you, but I know what I get down on paper isn’t good at all. Plus, if I started writing fiction, I wouldn’t have time to keep my blog going.

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