Unpacking from Realm Makers

My suitcase is finally empty. The laundry's in the wash. My room is finally clean. I had to rearrange my bookshelf again to fit all the new ones. The conference lanyard is hanging off my mirror. Life, for all the crazy I’ve experienced, has returned to normal.

Except...

I don't think my brain got the memo.

Because I'm still unpacking Realm Makers.

I'm not exactly sure what I expected to happen at Realm Makers. I knew there would be classes. I knew I'd meet a bunch of authors. And I knew I'd be pitching my novel to an agent—which was somehow both the most exciting and terrifying thing I'd done in a long time. But I don’t think anyone could have prepared me for what the weekend truly held in store.

Because for the first time in my entire life I met people who were exactly like me. See, I grew up surrounded by a family of people who love science and math and working with their hands. Writing, at least creatively, was something I mostly did alone. But suddenly, as I stood in that conference room, I looked around at the hundreds of people who were standing there with me and was amazed to realize, “Every single one of these people writes.”

An insane thought. In one moment…my tiny little world had expanded beyond the walls of my bedroom. Somehow, in the span of just a few days, I discovered something I didn’t even realize I was missing.

A community.

A group of teens who could sit around for hours just chatting about psychotic nonsense that only writers understand. A posse of authors who took me under their wing and showed me what it was like to do what I’d always dreamt of doing. People who don’t shrug you aside when you say you’re struggling to figure out how to end your book. People who consider "work" to be staring at a computer screen, rearranging twenty-six letters of the alphabet until beads of sweat form on your forehead. People who understand that sometimes, to work out a plot hole, you just have to stare at a wall until inspiration strikes from the strata pattern of the ice cream stains on the floor.

Every night, the teens would gather in Starbucks, and I'd be reminded of it all over again.

For one, crazy moment all the chairs would be scraping against the floor as we pulled them around the largest table we could find. But when the chatter stopped, the earbuds went in, and the heads went down: all you could hear was the scritch of a pencil, the clack of a keyboard, and the occasional rhythm of footsteps outside the glass doors. And that was when I finally felt at home.

If Brandon Sanderson’s “spren” existed in the real world, I’m positive hundreds of creationspren would be crawling all over that Starbucks. There was something tangible about it—the creativity that bled from you when you looked around and realized that everybody else was bleeding as well.

But it wasn’t just the writing that surprised me, it was the conversations. It was the way people talked to me. At the beginning of the conference, when I had just introduced myself to my teachers/mentors/friends, they would say things like:

“Well, if you get published.”

Which made perfect sense. I was just another aspiring young writer walking through a hotel lobby with a nametag hanging around her neck and a backpack hanging off her shoulders. But somewhere between Thursday morning and Saturday afternoon…something changed. After three days of getting to know me—and getting to know my work—the word had changed.

Suddenly people were saying,

“When you get published.”

I don’t think they even realized they were doing it. I don’t think anyone else noticed.

I did.

It’s not like they knew the future. No one does. But there's something incredibly encouraging about a bestselling author looking you in the eyes and talking as though your dream is something that could actually happen.

—-

The first time I shared my work with my classmates, we were doing a prompt exercise in the Teen Track Workshop.

The sentence appeared on the projector…and my stomach immediately dropped.

I had absolutely no clue what to write.

Nothing came. Everyone else had their pens uncapped and the timer had already started. Then, glancing down at a blank sheet of paper that seemed to be judging me, I clicked my pen and began writing.

My mind was blank, and yet, words were coming.

They were pouring out of me from a recess I didn’t even know existed.

One moment the page was empty…then suddenly two of them were filled with scribblings.

Before I even knew what was happening, my hand was in the air, a microphone was in front of me, and I had suddenly invited a room full of strangers to a world that hadn’t existed until five minutes prior.

But that was the first time I realized I was a writer.

And for the first time, I let other people see it too.

—-

If you've never pitched to an agent before: imagine trying to summarize hundreds of pages and an entire year of work into two sentences, while simultaneously trying to remember how breathing works.

It’s…interesting.

I was late to my fifteen-minute appointment.

By approximately ten minutes.

Somehow I made my way through the script I'd rehearsed a thousand times over the past week in under a minute. Maybe I was rushing. Maybe it had always taken that long. I don't know. I don't care. I was on a time crunch.

I don’t remember everything. I don’t really remember what I said. I don’t remember what she said.

But I remember my hands. I remember hoping I wasn’t talking too fast. I remember praying I wouldn’t forget my story.

Then, when I stopped talking, she smiled…and requested my full manuscript.

I nearly blacked out.

I made it all the way to the lobby couches before my composure completely abandoned me. I fell onto one of them and laughed. And when I managed to text my author friend about it, her first response was that she would help me get it ready for submission. It wasn't an offer of representation. It wasn't a book deal. But it was the first baby step—and for a writer who had never even crawled before, it felt like a hand reaching down from heaven.

Which it basically was.

I wish I could say I managed this because I have it all together or that I know exactly what I’m doing. But the truth is that I didn’t do anything. I asked God to shove the answer in my face, and He did.

Because God is so good.

Because, as Bill Myers said on his Friday keynote, “He is so hopelessly in love with every one of us that He let us torture Him to death just so He could hang out with us.”

Because He cares more than anyone can ever imagine.

And every now and then I look at the lanyard hanging off my mirror, or the new books on my shelves, or the empty suitcase on my floor…and I remember another lesson. Another conversation. Another memory. Another reminder that maybe this impossible dream isn't so impossible after all.

I guess some things don’t fit in your suitcase.

They come home with you anyway.

Until next time,

Elizabeth