It Was a Dark and Stormy Night (blog post)
This is a writing sample from Scripted writer Ruth Peterson
It was a dark and stormy night. After life handed me a series of unpleasant events (divorce, the passing of my father, the impending passage of my mother), I decided the fatigue, despair, and general burn-out from my programming job, could not continue to be a part of my days. Time was just too precious. So, during that dark and stormy night, I made a choice. I was in tears, on the kitchen floor, wishing it would end. I almost didn't care how it ended, I just needed something other than the pain that was present every single day. There had to be something better than this. So I made the choice to leave my job. I had savings, skills. Surely there was something else out there for me. There's a saying that goes something like this: leap and the net will appear. Over the years, I'd read about people doing this. Many make it work to their advantage. One blogger I followed made that leap and I never read anything from her again, which kind of worried me. Still, I believed in the net. So I leapt. There was no net and I fell flat on my face. As I was going through my divorce, I learned my husband had found someone sixteen years younger than me. I was the fat, first wife. My self-esteem and self-worth took a nose dive. All the way to the bottom. I was shattered. As time progressed, I tried on different lives, so to speak. I spent time doing delivery, working in a grocery store, doing assembly, and more. These were jobs for which I had zero passion. I couldn't even fake passion, but I did them anyway because I believed I had no choice. More time passed. Eventually, I sat down at the computer and began to work on a story I'd started years before. The passion for storytelling came back to me and I lost myself in what I was writing. I've always loved my characters, but this story ended up being very different. Better. I finished it inside of a year. And then I put it away. For years. But I felt better. The despair that had plagued me for a long time began to lift. Yet I was still doing these entry-level jobs which require no skill at all. Occasionally I was mildly successful, other times, well, not so much. Overall, it wasn't something I wanted to continue. The story I'd written stayed with me. One day, not all that long ago, I went back to writing. I came up with new ideas for the series I'd started years before. In about six months, I'd written one novella and one full novel. They became a trilogy and fit together perfectly. I found my new style and it was good. I'm not doing grocery jobs anymore. Whether writing turns out to be profitable or not remains to be seen. I'm hopeful. I feel better. My self-esteem and self-worth are higher than they've ever been, thanks to a renewed sense of purpose.
Written by:
