Why Did I Start Writing?
I get asked that a lot. Why did I start writing . . . well, there’s a story there. You see, I didn’t plan on becoming an internationally published New York Times bestselling author. In fact, I steered my college education as far from writing as I could. In college, I studied physics, not writing or literature . . . physics! When I graduated in 1986, I think, I didn’t go into industry; I wasn’t a very good student and my resume looked pretty pathetic. And in fact, I don’t think I would have been happy in aerospace (that was the main place for sciency people around Los Angeles). Instead, I focused on public education and taught physics and math for 15 years. After teaching for a decade and a half, I finally went into industry, working for General Electric as a physicist for another 15 years. While I was working at GE, I started to write.
But let me get to WHY.
While I was working at General Electric, I decided I wanted to write a novel, with the purpose of teaching my young son some important lessons. You see, I wasn’t the most aggressive person. I wasn’t a risk-taker. I didn’t do things where the likely outcome would be failure. Those were not me. But I wanted my young son to learn these traits as he grew older. He would never learn these traits from me, so I thought maybe writing could help.
I wanted my son to learn how to be a risk-taker, how to be unafraid to fail, how to try really hard things, through the characters in my books.
So I started writing my first science fiction novel called The Crystal Tear. I was writing it for the Young Adult audience, but it kinda took off on its own and ended up being 1200 pages long . . . YIKES! I knew nothing about
plot construction, character development, pacing, tension, dialogue . . . I knew absolution nothing. But ignorance did not deter me; I wrote every night and all weekend long. I wrote on vacation and on airplanes and in airports. It took me about four years to finish The Crystal Tear, and I thought it was perfect. I read it to my son, and he seemed to like it. In fact, I thought The Crystal Tear was so good, it would probably make world peace a reality and I’d probably win a Nobel Prize, :-).
After reading the book to my son at bedtime, I decided to try and get it published. I sent letters and emails to agents. I made phone calls and I met agents at conferences. I barraged the industry with my query letters. And in the end, I earned a weighty 253 rejections!
253 agents and publishers rejected me.
Ouch!
But I was not deterred. Instead of giving up, I started buying books on writing. I read Jordan Rosenfeld’s great book Make a Scene. I read Larry Brook’s Story Engineering, and I read Noah Lukeman’s First Five Pages: a writer’s guide to staying out of the rejection pile. Of course, I read Save the Cat! by Blake Snyder and countless others. I wanted to learn the craft of writing, and after reading and studying, I started writing again.
I started on a SciFi series called The Algae Voices of Azule series. This time, each of the three books in the series came in at around 100-120 pages. Also, I focused on the Middle-Grade audience instead of Young Adult, thinking middle-graders would be more understanding of my bad writing
I finished these three books in about two years, then started the query dance again. However, this time I learned from my last mistake; I didn’t count my rejections, though there were A LOT! In the end, no agent or publisher wanted to even give these books a read. Chock up failures number 2, 3, 4.
I’ve been writing now for over six years, and everything I wrote was a catastrophic FAILURE.
Now I started thinking, maybe I wasn’t meant to be an author. Maybe those first 253 No’s were right. I was contemplating giving up when Minecraft came into our life. My son was obsessed with it, but while he was playing with people from the Internet on his own server, he was cyber-bullied by a couple of kids. It was very traumatic for him and us. My son asked me “What did I do to deserve this kind of treatment?” I tried to get him to understand that it wasn’t his fault, but this is something many victims of bullying believe, that somehow they deserve their terrible treatment. To finally get my son to understand that this wasn’t his fault, I decided to write one more book that would explain what kind of people would do this to him. I’d use Minecraft as the tapestry upon which I’d paint the story, hoping his obsession would drive the lesson home.
I started to write once again, but this time, I thought about my past failures as well as what I learned from all those dog-eared books on writing. I focused on characters instead of plot. I tried to show, not tell, and I kept cranking up the tension as the story progressed. In the end, I’d written my first Minecraft novel called Invasion of the Overworld. We read it at bedtime and my son said, “I get it, Dad, those kids were just jerks.” HURRAY!!!
I thought this book was much better than the previous four and wanted to get it published, but knew I’d successfully failed at that 4 times. Instead of chasing the illusive Literary-Agent, I self-published on Amazon. The book durdled along with a bestsellers rank (BSR) in the millions, then something happened, I don’t know what, but it started to climb the Amazon-ladder. It cracked the top 100 in November of 2013
When the book reached #30 on Amazon’s top 100 on December 7th, 2013, that’s when the agents and publishers started calling me. I quickly landed a fantastic agent, Holly Root, and then penned a deal with Skyhorse Publishing, and I was off to the races.
I ended up writing 24 Minecraft novels which were published in 31 countries around the world, and the first series, the Gameknight999 series, landed on the New York Times bestsellers list for Middle-Grade series.
Needless to say, I was pleased, but what struck me was the irony of the entire process. Here I was trying to write some books to teach my son about how to take a risk, how to try something hard even though failure was a very real option. I wanted to write these books because I didn’t have these traits, but in the end, I did exactly what I wanted to teach my son. I tried something insanely difficult – get a book published. I failed 4 times but kept plugging away at it. I kinda felt like the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz – the Tin Man had a heart all along, and it seemed that I was able to take these risks, confront failure, and laugh in its face all along, wow; the whole experience was steeped with irony . . . but what a ride.
I’ve shared this Growth-Mindset story about how I became an author with many elementary schools. If you’re interested in having me talk at your school, send me an email through my website, www.MarkCheverton.com, or DM me through social media.
Mark
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