Writers--Try The Back Roads First

Several years ago, after a two-day meeting in St. Louis, Ken and I left the hotel on a quiet Sunday morning to drive to Macomb, IL to visit his brother in Macomb, IL. We started out on an interstate and after crossing the Mississippi River, found ourselves on some back roads. Not four or six-lane highways, but two lanes that wound through the Illinois flatlands, cornfields on both sides of the road. Cornstalks stood at attention like sentries on guard, leaves brown and dry encasing corn cobs waiting to be harvested. Recent rains had kept farmers out of the fields.

We wended our way through one small town after another, admiring the old homes and downtown areas. We pointed out interesting buildings to one another and commented that the trees here had lost more leaves than in our home state of Kansas. The peace and quiet of these back roads and the communities that dotted them were soothing to the soul. No fighting big city traffic here.

Writing can be like that, too. Writers start out hoping to hit the big-time. They want those Broadway lights in their writing world. Oh, to be published in The Atlantic or New York Times. Or maybe Good Housekeeping magazine or The New Yorker. It’s a nice dream, but to reach those major highways, we have to traverse the back roads first.

We need to start at the beginning. It might be a no-pay place where we are first published. And from there, we go on to low-pay. No-pay to low-pay! It’s the way we begin. We might get 1 cent a word, move on to 5 cents a word and more. The back roads of publishing move more slowly than we’d like, but they do keep us from stagnating in one spot. As we traverse farther and farther along in our writing careers, we see the interstate highways--the Autobahns of our field. How far we can go is an unknown, but as long as that big six-lane highway is our goal, we’ll keep moving toward it.

Meanwhile, enjoy the back roads of publication. They’re alright, and they’re a means to those expressways of publishing we all aspire to. Our poster today mentions running to get to your dream. Start on those back roads and see where they take you.