I used to have a proper job, with security, pension, decent wage. At first I loved teaching, and was good at it, but after several years everything changed. They dumbed down the whole syllabus so that they could make young kids ‘feel good about themselves’ and the problems with spelling and grammar miraculously disappeared overnight.
After sticking it for a few more years I remember sitting in an examiners’ meeting and being told that we could only take ten per cent of the marks off for ‘mechanical errors’ (by which they meant spelling and grammar) and all the rest of the marks would be based on ‘content’ - i.e. if we didn’t fall asleep whilst reading the forty-third essay on ‘My Favourite Food.’ I decided, there and then, that I’d had enough.
In my spare time I’d been writing myself. I sold a short article to a magazine, then another. It was enough to convince me that I could do this for a living, and I handed in my notice. My parents were shocked and disappointed that I was ‘wasting’ all my education and training, despite the fact that I had already spent fifteen years putting back into the education system the stuff I’d taken out of it. I had started a new life, with a new man and a new house many miles away from my old one, and starting a new career fitted in well with that.
Yes it was tough, at first. I had a son to support and my partner had to live in another place because I was claiming benefit, but I always viewed this as a temporary hardship. I didn’t have to worry about paying rent because I’d bought my house outright (see my other ‘Doing Things Differently’ blog on not getting into debt). My parents wanted me to learn to drive, thinking I would need to do part-time teaching work to survive, but although I made some half-hearted efforts I never passed the test. Touchingly, my Dad offered to support me for a year while I tried to make a success of being a writer but I turned him down, wanting to make it on my own terms.
Slowly I sold more articles, started to build up a small weekly income – enough to come off the ‘dole’ and get income support instead: this was for people on low wages, not no wages. It did wonders for my self-esteem. Then I began writing regular short stories for the ‘True Life Confessions’ magazines that were popular at that time. They were anonymous, so readers could imagine they were the love stories of real people. I loved writing them, and soon was selling regularly to all the titles on the market.
That market crashed some time later, and I was left without a major part of my income, so I did some supply teaching for a while. But it wasn’t long before I found new outlets, and once again I was selling both fiction and non-fiction to a variety of magazines. The editors had come to know and trust me, and I was no longer put into the ‘slush pile.’ When I’d started out I was only selling about one in ten of the pieces I sent out; after a while I was selling nine out of ten. I had a system: send out to the highest payers first, and if they rejected a story or article send out to the editors who paid less well. I kept meticulous records, and it was great to see so many ticks in the column headed ‘Accepted or Rejected.’
My real goal was to write novels, and eventually I succeeded in the romantic fiction field and ended up with twenty-five novels published as paperbacks under various pseudonyms. By then I knew I was a real writer, even taking on critiquing work and giving writers’ workshops. I had given up the day job and followed my dream, and it had come true!
Image from Pixabay