Read Becoming the Story for Free Online Page B

like the world had broken into tiny pieces that had no
association with each other anymore.
    She had wanted so much to make a living
writing, to be an “official writer,” but the stories she had to
tell were not the stories the publishers wanted to hear. She felt
silenced.
    She saw herself as living in a fragmented
world with skewed lines and disorder and uncertainty. It was
intolerable.
    She picked up a pen again and wrote. They
were scrawls at first, nothing special, just marks. She looked at
them, and they seemed as broken, as fragmented as her life had
become. Where had the power gone?
    She wrote every day, even though it hurt her
to read what she had written. The effort to record her breakfast or
the temperature seemed hardly worthwhile, but she did it
anyway.
    Those broken attempts to put together the
scattered pieces of her life somehow mattered. They mirrored a
problem inside her that she wanted more than anything to fix,
although looking at that reflection hurt more than anything, and
she left each writing session feeling so drained, she could barely
lift her feet to walk.
    She tried to remember what she had once
loved about stories. She remembered the fairy tales with their
beautiful princesses and dashing suitors and the epic poems full of
dauntless heroes. She remembered the tales of personal struggle and
triumph, and she remembered Rita, and the day Maggie realized she
could create her own stories rather than accept the ones she was
given.
    Her mind got hung up on that thought. Create
her own stories. Although she was indoors, she felt a kind of wind
blow through her. It chilled her spine and warmed her heart. She
grabbed a sheet of paper and a pen.
    She wrote. She wrote about an unattractive
girl who had come along and got glowered at and loved to write
stories; a girl who had been bullied and befriended bullied kids
and made cookies for her dad. She wrote about a girl who wanted to
write for a living and show everyone they had been wrong to glower
at her.
    She wrote about a girl who sent her stories
to publishers who ignored her or said they were not drawn in or
that her stories were self-indulgent.
    She wrote about a girl who was so
discouraged she gave up forever and lost the thing she most loved
and lived out an unhappy, fragmented life where nothing she did,
touched, or felt had any clear relationship to her.
    She reread what she had written. She did not
like the story. She did not like it, and she never would. She tore
it up and began to write a new ending. It was harder this time.
    She wondered if the girl in the story Margie
was the right character to solve her problem, too passive, too
prone to the stabs of rejection. Maggy thought maybe she needed to
make some changes. Who was the right heroine for her story? What
traits did the ideal and successful heroine possess?
    She thought her character had to be
dauntless like the heroes of the epic tales but still sensitive
like the characters in stories about personal triumph. Maggie did
not think she was dauntless; rather, she was easily hurt.
    How could she become dauntless? What did
dauntless girls eat for breakfast? What did they do with their
time? She got out her notebook and wrote down all the questions,
but she could not be sure about the answers. That girl did not
exist yet.
    So she went to her books about writing and
read about what made a hero a hero. Usually, it was that they loved
something beyond just themselves and were willing to go through
hell to obtain or preserve it.
    What did she love? She loved stories. What
did she fear? She feared rejection.
    She tried to imagine rejection as a monster,
something with glassy eyes, drooling pea-green poison, a behemoth
of an epic poem to be slaughtered. In her imagination it was prone
to glowering.
    She wished fear of rejection was not so
intangible.i It would be much easier to deal with a real monster.
You could go at it with a sword and when it was dead, it would be
dead forever. She did not think