Hey there,
I'm Laura, I'm from Sydney, and I'm a fiction novelist.
Sometimes you see musings and discussion by people who are writers, and the question frequently comes up "why do you write?" and a lot of writers talk about needing to write, to get their stories and other thoughts out of their head and onto paper. Me? I see myself as a storyteller. I can tell my stories to myself without writing them down. There's no 'need' for me. Why I write, is because I want people to read my stories.
I'm not looking for fame and fortune, just for people who enjoy the things that I write, because I sure love telling stories. I get excited about telling stories. I want people to enjoy the stories that I enjoy telling, and I long for the day that I can give people something that they love.
Some background:
(warning, this turned into my life story for some reason, so just keep in mind that the most important thing from this post is above, and I guess everything below is just me getting lost in the joy of writing, even if the things I'm writing aren't exactly happy.
I was the kind of kid who read almost every waking moment of the day. I read books as I was walking to school in the morning. I'm not sure exactly when it started, but before I was 13, my dream became to be a writer.
Dream in mind, I started writing a novel when I was 13. It's terrible, but I would still show it to people. Even though I get embarrassed, I never hesitate to share my past - the good or the bad things. The only things I'm mortified by are my terrible titles, and I never tell people what those titles were.
Being in the mid-point between computers being brought into most households and everyone having their own computer, I wrote my story by hand in notebooks. I didn't use a computer for writing until I was out of school, after I had finished my first novel, so it was all handwritten.
Funny side-note: I was terrified of writing stories on the computer when I was younger. Computers had a habit of crashing and dying, and I didn't want everything I'd ever written to be erased from existence (printing was a luxury due to the cost of ink and the ability of printers to always be broken, so printing my stories never actually crossed my mind).
First story under my belt, fresh out of school and with the realistic notion in mind that pursuing writing stories as a career was not in one's best interests for the future but with no support or suggestions for directions for an actual career, I did nothing for the first year I was out of school. I got a job at Subway as a 'sandwich artist' because I had a friend who worked at the store and she recommended me. My mum pointed out an ad in the newspaper for a free bookkeeping course, and with no better options or ideas, I fell into bookkeeping. After finishing the course I got my first office job as a receptionist/accounts clerk.
A year into working in an office, my passion for writing had not waned. I was still writing - using a computer by this time - and I applied to do a university degree in creative writing. I thought I could work out if I had the talent to pursue writing, to do some journalism classes and see if I was any good at that, and to explore different forms of writing to see if writing novels actually was my perfect writing style.
I got into the university course, still working part time as an accounts clerk. In my first year of uni, I found out that I was terrible at journalism (apparently being concise is a big part of journalism), I was terrible at poetry (not a surprise, I'm not very good at imagery and metaphors), and I never quite got the hang of scripts - I had thought that a visual (or sound) medium would be better for me because I'm terrible at describing visuals, but I am not very matter-of-fact in my writing, and the narrator is more in a character's head than out of it.
In my second year I moved closer to the university with a friend in my course, because it took me so long to get there. This was the start of a major downhill slide in my life.
I had always been haunted by the spectre of mental illness. I suspected I had depression, related to a pitifully poor self-image that was related to how I felt about the friendships in my life. Moving away from the friends that I already had a complex about caused me to spiral. I was back at home with my parents more than I was at home in my flat near uni, but that didn't help. I got an actual diagnosis for depression and went to see a psychologist (but not for more than a few months, she made me uncomfortable), skipped classes, and that culminated in me dropping out of the core (theory) class, and therefore not being able to pass the year. I then dropped out of uni entirely.
I don't see my time at uni as being wasted, even though I don't have a degree, but I do have two years of my life in which I did nothing that contributes to my career (though those years are helpfully filled out in my resume by my previous office employing me on a part-time basis one year and a casual basis the next year), but my life has never gotten back on track. I had a failed job in an office that I didn't really fit in with, and was let go before the provisional period was up, and then my old workplace took me back on full time, but I never really got back into the swing of things. My depression showed itself in poor work ethic and no longer completing tasks properly, so I was given less work. When I continued to not perform at my job, I suggested I leave my position, because I liked my boss and my office and I thought that I was being unfair to them in under-performing.
I thought I could have a few months off work, take a holiday, and then find myself a part time job. It was 2011, and that was the year I started my blog for the first time. I wanted people to read what I wrote more desperately than ever. I wanted to do something that I saw as worthwhile, and so I started trying to write short stories, and posting them to my Blogger account. I had the idea to base stories on ideas from friends, and I'd use their name for the main character of the story. I thought this could attract my friends to read my stories where they had previously been reluctant.
As far as the job search went at that time, nobody seemed to want me. After a time of unemployment, I did some further study in accounts administration. After I finished that, employers still didn't look at me, and desperately, I applied for a stocktake job at Woolworths. They offered me the job, and mentioned they preferred their employees to stay on at least a year because of the cost of training them. I stayed there for two years. It was a reasonably easy job, I liked the atmosphere and the other staff, and I was just too lazy to look for a better job elsewhere. I did apply for some internal office jobs within the company, but I never ever heard back from them.
While I was working casually for Woolworths, I found that my short stories weren't exactly ... short, and that my friends weren't as attracted to that type of story as I thought. I've always written novels, and I've had a huge library of in-progress stories for a long time. I had the thought that I could make another blog - this one to post chapters of my stories and to keep people updated on my progress. There were a couple of stories I got a few comments on, and I made a Facebook fan page to help promote my page and post updates. I really hoped that at least my friends would take the time to read the things I wrote.
The only thing that gave me a push away from the easy but unfulfilling job of working as a stocktake clerk, was when someone hit me with their car one day as I was riding on my motorbike. I took a few months off, but when I returned I just wasn't quite fit enough to to the job as I wanted to any more. I applied for more part-time jobs with no success, but a small temp agency took me on. The first ever job I did with them led me to my previous part-time job as an accounts clerk, but that was recently made redundant, and now I have a new part-time position as an administrative assistant.
And so here I am today, on Steemit.
I have been in a slump for a while, and I'm hoping that this platform will gather me some interest and views for my writing, hopefully encouraging and invigorating me for the future and always be improving.
Well, if you read to the end here, I hope you gained some enjoyment from my story and my writing. I hope you are interested enough to hear from me again, I'd be pleased to hear from you. Maybe comment giving your own successes and/or failures in life, I love comments, and I love replying to them.
If you want, you can check out my page on Facebook: Laura H MacRae which eventually leads to my blog.