Everyone has a story, and everyone should share that story. It’s therapy for the writer and an education for the reader. That’s my philosophy and I’m sticking to it. Mine led to the writing of a novel.
It began at the beginning
I’ve been writing my whole life, starting with a series of ghost stories when I was seven. I wrote throughout my 37-year career as an educator-articles in teacher magazines, short fiction stories for writing workshops and kids’ tales to entertain my children and students. What I didn’t know then was that I had a novel buried deep inside me, biding its time, waiting, lurking, gathering steam.
And then I retired.
A new life stage
June 2020.
I had put in for retirement, as the school district required, December 1st of 2019. The world was still ignorant of the coming pandemic, and just coincidentally I was at that point everyone told me would come, “You’ll know when it’s time to retire, no matter how much you love what you do.”
The last three months of my career, I learned how to teach online. It was messy, devastating, demoralizing, scary, unsettling. I didn’t get the hugs and in-person celebrations I had come to expect from years of colleague retirements. That last click of logging off on that last day with my students was a hollow, sad ending to an amazing career.
Fortunately for me, my daughter and her husband, my mother, and my husband were waiting for me outside the closed office door. Daughter had taped a finish line across the doorway, made me back up my sad-faced self, raise my arms in the air and come whoo-hooing across it to their cheers and a bottle of champagne.
The next day, I started writing my first novel.
I had not planned on it; I just knew I wanted to write the stories I had grown up with. My family history was loaded with them. Just to give you a clue, I call myself a Spanish-speaking Jew with an Irish name.
I wrote six hours a day, five days a week. It was seamless, how it flowed from full-time teaching to full-time writing. It actually helped that we were all quarantined. I am a raging FOMO extrovert who never says no. Now there was nothing to say no to.
I realized two things after the first few stories fleshed out: they would make a great book if I could stitch them together; and I didn’t have enough details to make that happen.
Historical fiction?
My thing had always been writing fiction stories of ordinary people who dealt with extraordinary things. People who became obsessed with lightning, people who had psychic abilities they were scared of, people who got telephone calls from deceased relatives. I thought Stephen King was the best storyteller in the entire world and wished I could live in his brain for just 24 hours.
I was an avid reader of historical fiction, but as a writer? Definitely not that.
Still the stories poured out of me, now augmented and fictionalized using the wonderful resource at my literal fingertips: the internet. Soon the characters began to take on lives of their own, meeting other characters and weaving together a narrative that, at some point, I realized needed to be told.
I found that writing each character’s story as a separate entity made the idea of a book much less daunting for me. It also allowed me to deal with the dreaded writer’s block, since when I got stuck on one of the narratives, I simply put it aside and worked on another until the first character felt neglected and came banging down the door for attention.
I also realized that since history is a collection of the stories of people’s lives through world events, well, historical fiction could, and maybe should, also be that. But.
My other daughter, also an educator and a writer, said, “Mom, where’s the story arc? Novels need a beginning, middle, end, a problem and resolution, a character that learns something and changes through the story.”
Huh.
I tried. I really did try to rework the whole thing into a typical commercial structure. But the characters would not cooperate. They said, No, that’s not how this one works. But you’re the writer, figure it out.
Don’t you hate that-when fictional people run your life, and worse, when they are right? I Googled novels that are a collection of separate stories and holy cow, they are legion! I was not alone; in fact, I was in very, very good company, and all those books are either cultural or historical fiction or both. Vindication!
Getting it done
I cast off doubt, which threatened constantly to end this foray into novel writing, and just went for it. I used Microsoft Word because it was what I was used to and discovered the amazing feature of giving different sections a headline and using Navigation to move them around each other. As the stories grew into novellas, I struggled with how to sew them together in a cohesive way that could tell a story. It was actually the last and maybe most difficult part of the endeavor.
But just like finding the jigsaw puzzle piece you need, it clicked into place in a way that felt so satisfying. There’s no other way to describe it, and in my experience, you can’t force it to happen-it was an organic thing that I never foresaw.
Buy it!
Buy a copy of Woven by Maureen Morrissey here, and help support local bookstores! This is an affiliate link, and I will earn a commission on any sales.
Publishing
I had attempted, throughout my career, to publish the traditional way but found it aggravating and limiting; so, I went the indie route. It helps that I now have the time to dedicate to editing, finding beta readers, designing the cover and inside matter, promoting and marketing, and everything else that goes into birthing a novel and sending it out in the world.
I am so very proud of my firstborn. It was a labor of love that I call my therapy book. I went on to write a second novel, even though I never thought that would happen for me. And I just published my third last month, also something I never planned or expected.
I learned so many important lessons in the process of writing my first novel, and even more with the second and third:
- Trust yourself
- Stay out of your own way
- Don’t give up even when you really, really think you should and even if it takes years to get done.
I’m amazed at my life as a writer; it’s so much fun and so interesting. As an educator, I hope I affected people’s lives in a positive way that would ripple into the future as my anonymous legacy. Leaving behind books is now part of my legacy that won’t be anonymous.
I have no idea where this journey will take me next and I’m buckling my seatbelt. I’m expecting quite a ride.
About the author
Maureen Morrissey is a writer, retired educator, wife/mother/grandmother/dog mommy, avid reader, photographer, traveler, and most recently, half-marathon runner.
Maureen began writing her first novel, Woven: Six Stories, One Epic Journey, the day after retiring from teaching fourth grade in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic. She published a second novel, Sonder: Janie’s Story in March 2022, and her third, Seeing is Believing, in June 2023.
Reach out to Maureen at her websites or via email!
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It sounds wonderful that retirement brought an opportunity to explore something that nestled within you; to be able to let that creativity flow in a new way seems like a really lovely fresh start. Thanks for sharing this!
Thanks for reading! Taking on a project as large as writing a book can be really intimidating, but her experience shows how it can be worth it.
A fabulous post about discovering a passion after a lifetime spent in pursuit of different moments!