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Hi Novelspotters! I’m Isabo Kelly and I’m chatting a bit about how I came to be a writer. Sorry I’m posting a little late today. No, I didn’t go into labor yet. But my apartment was descended on by family members assembling furniture for me, and I couldn’t get near the computer. Since the furniture is baby related, I couldn’t argue.

Now back to the story…

As I mentioned yesterday, I never thought I’d actually be a writer. I thought I’d write in my spare time, but I’d be a scientist. I didn’t think I was good enough to publish anything I wrote. Publish? I didn’t think I was good enough to even call myself a writer!

My first year in college, though, I had a professor who managed to change my mind. I wish I could remember her name because it’s thanks to her that I decided maybe I could be a writer after all. The class was one of those standard English classes you take in college to satisfy credit requirements. It wasn’t a hard class for me, just a lot of essay writing and as I mentioned, I’m not great at non-fiction. But I got by. And then I wrote an essay which I ended with a bit of description about a dream I’d had about a whale. Those last few paragraphs were the closest I was able to get to fiction in this class, and apparently, the writer in me came out. The professor actually pulled me aside after class to tell me how much she liked that particular part of the essay and had I considered becoming a writer.

Needless to say, I started to take the idea a little more seriously. Up to that point, I’d had friends encouraging me to write, but this was the first time a teacher had hinted—or in this case, said outright—that I might actually have the talent needed.

The next year I transferred to college in Hawaii, still a science major, with every intention of remaining a scientist and keeping writing as a secondary pursuit. But I did intend to PURSUE writing, which was more than I had before that. I didn’t know how to go about getting published, not a clue. I’d never heard of the Writers’ Market and at that time there was no Internet to turn to for help. I didn’t know any other writers. So getting published was more of a dream in the background than something I considered immediately doable. But I wrote. I wrote a lot, when I wasn’t studying or thoroughly enjoying the life of a student in Hawaii (which is, I have to admit, really really great fun). And I steadily built up my ability to put a story together.

My second year in Hawaii, I did a semester internship where I worked with dolphins at a research lab where we studied their cognitive abilities—basically researching dolphin intelligence (and they’re really bloody smart, by the way). Now it just so happens that a graduate student at the lab had a brother who was a writer. He mostly wrote non-fiction but some fiction as well. He was published. And he was more than happy to share information with me. He’s the one who pointed me toward the Writers’ Market and encouraged me to submit my short stories. I let other people at the lab read some of my work and got encouragement there too.

On top of finally learning what I needed to do to get published, I found myself writing a fiction story for a journal I was keeping for my Spanish class. I got bored too quickly just writing a weekly entry, so I wrote on ongoing story. Not an easy thing to do in a language I can’t speak or read well, but it was a good way for me to learn. And again, my teacher pulled me aside after class one day to tell me how much she was enjoying the story and I should try to get it published.

Those two things encouraged me to give it a try. I wrote a short story, found a magazine I thought would fit the story (I only picked one, btw; I wasn’t clever enough yet to know I could try several publishers), figured out how to write a query letter, and submitted the story. My very first submission. Then I went back to being a scientist.

A few months later, I got my first form rejection letter. And while it was a little disheartening, I’d read enough at that point to know rejection letters were a necessary part of the publication process. I officially had my first. I felt like a “real” writer.