My Journey to Becoming a Writer

I don’t know about you, but I love a good how-I-became-a-writer story, so I thought I would pen my own for anyone who is interested. I envy those writers who say they knew from a young age that they wanted to be a writer and haven’t wasted a minute since. Unfortunately, I am not one of those.

Even though I wrote from a very young age, I never contemplated becoming a writer, mostly because I grew up in a family that was mostly illiterate and the arts and literature were never celebrated. We were too busy just trying to survive. I grew up in a domestic violence situation due to my father being a violent alcoholic. Most of my earliest memories involve me locking myself away in my bedroom and escaping into books, imaginary worlds, poetry, and classical music.

I was rescued when approximately six years old when a couple who were Assemblies of God pastors visited the Housing Commission area where I lived and asked my parents if my siblings and I could attend Sunday School. There started my journey with my saviour, a journey where I was saved from harm more times than I can count, and God’s faithfulness is still evident in my life each and every day.

Even from an early age, I was interested in the arts. I recall reciting a monologue in church on the stage when in primary school, faultlessly remembering every word, and then as a young teen, I wrote religious plays for puppet shows that were performed in church. When I was sixteen, I wrote a large screenplay about the rapture, years before the infamous Left Behind series was published. The play was performed in church in place of the sermon to a full auditorium, with the overflow lining the back walls. Despite all this, I thought my writing skills were ordinary, believing they were skills everyone possessed. No one ever took me aside and said, ‘Hey, you have a gift. You should do something with it.’ And with no one in my immediate or extended family having studied at tertiary level, or having graduated high school, I never considered going to university to study.

However, many years later, in 2007, when I was 31 years old and married with three children, I began studying to be a secondary English and History teacher. During this time, I lost my first husband to cancer, becoming a single mother. After graduating, I taught literature to future teachers at a Christian college. I still did not think I had anything of value to offer and turned down opportunities to take on full-time work in the tertiary sector as a lecturer.

In 2011, I wrote my autobiography, A Life More Than Ordinary, and felt euphoria and a great sense of achievement when it was published (under my previous name Julie Tyrie) in early 2013 by a co-publishing press. The book sold copies in Australia and overseas, and I went on TV and was featured in magazines. However, as the sole provider for my family, I needed to work, so I started teaching in high schools. After ten years of teaching, and after getting remarried in a divinely orchestrated meet-cute to an incredible, godly man, I felt strongly to focus on my writing again, having previously written 25,000 words of a novel that had sat on the shelf for six years. I loved teaching, but I felt unfulfilled. I was helping students achieve their dreams, but I wasn’t achieving my own. I also noticed that I excelled at helping students write their short stories for assessment, coming up with great plot lines and motifs that saw students lined up to get help til the bell rang. I lost a lot of lunch breaks to keen students wanting my help on how to write the perfect story. I started to think that maybe I should write again myself, and after reading Steven Pressfield’s book The War of Art, I realised that teaching English was my shadow career, the career I chose for security that was parallel with writing, using the same skills and requiring the same passion for words and books. So, at the beginning of 2021, I quit teaching—which was exceptionally hard to do—and threw myself into the blessed unknown where the bodies of disheartened and failed writers were strewn wherever I looked.

As an English teacher and a lecturer on literature, I thought I knew how to write. How wrong I was! I discovered my vast inadequacies regarding writing craft when attending a number of online courses at the Australian Writers’ Centre (AWC) and when reading numerous books on writing craft, enough to fill a library. Nearly five years on from my deep dive into all things books, writing, and publishing, I am just getting my head above water and starting to see some progress and results. They say you can expect to be penniless for ten years before seeing any results or money from your writing. That is, of course, unless you are a genius and in the right place at the right time, writing the right book that the world wants in that very moment—when the world doesn’t actually have a consensus on what it wants. They say it takes 10,000 hours of practice to master a skill, gift, or talent, so you have to be in it for the long haul. In fact, I have now taken the huge leap and started studying a Master of Creative Writing and feel like I am almost back at the drawing board as I learn even more about the craft of writing.

After nearly five years of struggling with resistance, self-doubt, and imposter syndrome, I have stopped looking at teaching jobs on Seek.com every week. I now only look once a month or so. But each time, I feel God gently scolding me and telling me to get back in my lane. If you think teaching a room full of rowdy, hormonal teenagers would be hard, it’s a piece of cake compared to being an author. Writing is not for the faint of heart, and one needs endurance, self-discipline, patience, and rhino-thick skin. My favourite quote about writing is, ‘If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.’ Dorothy Parker sums up the pursuit of becoming a writer perfectly (and I also highly recommend The Elements of Style by Strunk and White - see my blog titled ‘What’s on My Bookshelf?’ in the Writer’s Hub).

But despite the long days, weeks, months, and years with few rewards or recognition for my hard work, without staff Christmas parties, and without schedules that tell me what day of the week it is, I can’t give up on this thing called writing that has me by the tail and won’t let go. I’ve tried to shake it off and imagined myself in a world of normality, financial security, and the blessed nine-to-five, but I lose my peace any time I open my laptop and start applying for jobs. Thankfully, God foresaw this season and blessed me with a husband who is eager to support my writing financially, so I am one of the blessed ones who gets to live the writerly life that many only dream of. And that 25,000 words of a novel that I wrote in 2015 is now a complete, beautiful manuscript that is now being pitched to publishers—after ten years. Ten years of practice—I must be an expert now . . . Nope, far from it. I am also super blessed to have a teen novella being traditionally published and released in August this year .

Two things keep me at my writing desk (or in bed in my PJs with my laptop on my lap—an aptly named device). The first one is my burning desire to be obedient to God’s will, to be about my Father’s business, and to be in His perfect will. I don’t want to forego all the amazing writerly things God has prepared for me by playing it safe. The second thing that keeps me at my writing desk is a quote by the late former contestant of America’s Got Talent and Christian singer, Jane Marczewski, aka Nightbirde. Before she passed away from cancer in February 2022, she said, ‘Don’t you want to know what happens if you don’t give up?’ Yes, I do, and that’s why I continue to write.