One Sentence in Red Ink
A college teacher covered my story in red ink and said I’d never be a writer. It cost me years. One bad remark from an authority can outlast almost anything.Share on X
I wrote my whole life. As a kid I wrote short papers, articles, and stories. Almost none of it was published, and most of it I never showed anyone. Teachers read what I turned in and mostly didn’t care. That was fine.
Then in college, an English teacher was supposed to be teaching us to write stories. He took one of mine, handed it back bloody with red ink, and told me I’d never be a writer. I believed him. That one sentence, from one person with the authority to say it, discouraged me for years.
It’s funny, and not in a good way, how a single bad remark from someone in a position of authority can live inside you for decades. I’ve written more than a hundred books since then. I still remember his red ink. That’s how much weight we give to the people we let judge us, and how wrong they can be.
Watch: Celebrating National Authors Day with Amy Jo Burns and Min Jin Lee, NBC News
I Wrote Anyway, For a Long Time, For Other People
The teacher didn’t stop me. He just made me quiet about it.
Through my working years I wrote constantly, mostly user guides and technical manuals.
I rose to vice president, and I was still the one who wrote the books nobody else wanted to touch, because somebody had to and I was the one who could. I didn’t call myself an author. I just did the work that authors do, for years, without the title.
I grew up restless, scattered, and driven in ways nobody had a name for at the time.
I turned that into a whole book later, called My Life in Crazytown, about a childhood that taught me to use a wiring I didn’t understand yet. The same engine that made school hard made the writing pour out. I just didn’t know what I was looking at back then.
The Slow, Unglamorous Climb
Nobody becomes an author in one leap. I went from tiny gigs to cheap books to my first real contracts. The title arrived years after the work did.Share on X
In 2013 I left my corporate career, moved from California to Florida, and put down roots in Clearwater. I had enough in the bank to last a few years, and I went looking for work that fit me.
The early version was rough. I wrote LinkedIn profiles for a makeover service, tiny one-time gigs with a constant stream of new strangers, which for an introvert was its own special hell. I moved to a small ghostwriting agency and wrote books for a thousand or fifteen hundred dollars each. One was an Afghan politician’s memoir that never got finished because he had to leave for Afghanistan. It would have been a great book.
I was getting paid peanuts, so within a year I started my own ghostwriting business. That’s where it broke open.
The Two Books That Changed Everything
Two contracts landed at the same time, each worth twenty-five thousand dollars. At the time that was enormous for me. It would be significant even now, and both arrived at once.
One became the cybersecurity book Cyberheist. The other became Mastering Digital Transformation. Both are in my case studies now. After those two, it was over in the best way. I was an author and a ghostwriter, and the question of whether I was allowed to be one stopped mattering.
Since then I’ve written a pile of books for other people and a pile for myself, the whole catalog of which lives here. I recently went back through my own titles and republished them through Ingram instead of Amazon, better quality and longer, because I’ve grown as a writer and the old versions no longer matched what I can do. Whole series came out of that. The point is, the red ink was wrong, and it took a shelf of books to prove it.
Why the Title Is Something You Claim
National Authors Day should remind anyone who has ever wanted to write that nobody grants you the title of author, and you have to take it yourself.
There’s no committee, no license, no teacher with a red pen who gets to decide. You become an author by writing and finishing and putting the work into the world. The gatekeepers can slow you down, and one of them slowed me down for years, but none of them can stop you unless you let them. The only person who can permanently disqualify you is you, by believing the wrong voice.
If you’re sitting on a book because someone once told you that you couldn’t, that person was guessing, and they were probably wrong. I’m living proof that the discouraging voice doesn’t get the final word unless you hand it to them.
How do you spend National Authors Day?
If you read, thank an author. Pick a writer whose work has mattered to you and tell them, or just buy their next book. Authors run on a strange mix of stubbornness and the rare sign that the work landed somewhere.
If you write, this is your day too, whether or not you’ve published a word.
Spend it writing. Finish the thing you keep starting. Ignore the red-ink voice in your head, the one that sounds like some authority who told you long ago that you didn’t have it. That voice is just an echo, and you can write straight through it.
I did, eventually. It took too long, and I have the books to show for it now. November 1 is a good day to start taking the title that was always yours to claim.