carey farrell

Today’s Yesterday’s Road Trip Wednesday asked, “What has your writing road trip looked like so far? Excitement? Traffic jams and detours? Where are you going next?”

I wrote my first book when I was six, and by the time I was seven, I’d decided to be a children’s book writer when I grew up. I had my very own writing desk, just like Betsy Ray in the Betsy-Tacy books, and I’d sit there every afternoon after school and scribble “novels” in tiny orange memo pads. All through elementary school and middle school, I kept writing. Stories about pioneers, stories about fairies, stories about the Monkees (oh, how I wish I were kidding), stories about my troll collection, and most of all, stories about kids like me. (I shared one of those stories, “Katie The Great,” a few years ago on 30 Is The New 13. You will probably enjoy reading it, if you like things like train wrecks, and laughing at me.)

In fifth grade, my best friend from creative writing camp (of course I had a best friend from creative writing camp; her name was Heather Beegle and I haven’t been able to find a trace of her online, and I’m using her name here in case she still exists and ever Googles herself) and I wrote a book called Andrea–about, unsurprisingly, a girl named Andrea. For Heather’s eleventh birthday, her dad got Andrea copyrighted, and we believed, in the way you can only believe in things before puberty sets in, that being copyrighted was “ALMOST AS GOOD AS BEING PUBLISHED.” All we had to do was send the book to Scholastic, or possibly Dell, and we’d be the next Ann M. Martins.

Well, actually…first, we had to finish the book.

Which…we never did.

I kept writing fiction through high school, and managed at least four semi-decent short stories, and some rewrites of old elementary school stories, as well as a lot of unfinished novel bits (oh, for my unborn Searching For Steven Gonks) and terrible song lyrics. I got published for the first time when I was a junior, and even though it was just the local kids literary magazine, and I knew full well that they published just about every submission, it was still kind of thrilling.

Then came college. And even though I got a scholarship based on my creative writing, and majored in English lit, and for some reason won an award for poetry at one point, I didn’t do much writing at all at Good Ol’ CND. In fact, I put off taking my one required creative writing class until my last semester. At the time, I felt like all the other writers on campus were Serious Writers–REAL WRITERS, writing about SEX and DRUGS and DEATH. My goofy kiddie stories and I just couldn’t compete. I felt outclassed. I got scared. I stopped writing fiction.

I put away my “writer” identity, the one I’d worn so proudly since I was in second grade, and I only really picked it up again in the last few years, once I started meeting other people who also loved reading and writing for kids. Watching people like my awesome friend Lisa and my awesome friend Erin pursue publication reminded me that this had been my dream once, too. And seeing them succeed gave me the kind of hope I hadn’t felt since Heather Beegle’s eleventh birthday party–like, if they could do it, maybe I could do it, too. The least I could do was try.

I’ve come a long way in the last few years. I’ve still got a long way to go. And I’ll probably never be where I dreamed of being when I was seven, because as it turns out, there’s only one Beverly Cleary. But I’ve got some kind of path in front of me. And sometimes, I can almost make out where it’s leading…