"the right time"
or, Lilly muses imposter syndrome & feeling too young in grad school and too old in the YA writing world
In graduate school, I always felt too young and rather out of place. Not only was I an Asian American scholar in the field of eighteenth-century British literature, but I was also, in my first year, twenty-two years old. There were a couple of people in my cohort even younger than I, but a bulk of my cohort were in their mid-to-late twenties, some in their thirties. A considerable number of them had higher degrees and had had full careers, and a few of them were married. Beyond numbers, everyone seemed older, more confident as they spoke in seminars, as they theorized and interpreted. They seemed to have read all of the important books, seemed to know all the theory, seemed to have their lives together, even down to their sense of personal style and fashion (I learned how to wing my eyeliner at 26).
When I was selected as a mentee for PitchWars in 2020 and became more active (read: lurky) in the writing community on Twitter, I was surprised to feel—too old. A lot of my fellow mentees were in university still. Many seemed to have been doing creative writing for a long time, whereas I had only just returned to it after giving up between college and grad school, thinking that I had to in order to be considered a “serious” scholar (I’d had a professor tell me it was either critical writing or creative writing, and there was no in-between.) (I have since learned how false that is.) And a lot of my fellow creatives in the writing community knew the lingo, knew which agents were reputable and which were on their dream lists, knew how querying worked. I, on the other hand, felt so out of my element, and leaned on my mentor a lot for very basic questions about the industry (e was incredibly gracious).
In both grad school and creative writing, whether “too young” or “too old,” I have felt out of place. But I suspect most everyone does, at all ages, nearly always.
Confidence is something you cultivate knowing that everyone also feels awkward, that everyone is also naïve and knowledgeable in various ways. And for me, the way to confidence has been through an appreciation for my journey.
If you follow me on Twitter, you’ve probably seen my near-monthly post about how I don’t believe in most conventional writing rules, especially those doled out by MFAs and academia; I think a lot of rules that make so-called good writing have embedded biases that keep what’s acceptable extremely narrow—and, as such, not diverse. This is intentional on an institutional level.
I am suspicious of most rules.
But an inkling I’ve had that is less rule and more lived truth is: I believe stories come to us when we need (to write) them most, and when we are most ready for them.
The manuscript I submitted to PitchWars in 2020—the manuscript that I signed with my wonderful agent on—came from an idea that I’d had in 2016. My main character came to me first: 17 years old, an ingénue who could see visions of death but not control them, at a Regency-era ball, with blood on her silk gloves. When I brainstormed in 2016, I saw her dancing with suitors, but for some reason, no romantic pairing came out of those musings. My main character refused each suitor I thought of, and I had no idea why. I put the pen down for a while.
Forward to 2020, in the midst of a global pandemic. I was writing my dissertation, I was worried about the future of the world, I was concerned for my loved ones abroad, and I had come out as queer.
Applying to PitchWars happened on a whim. I took the application timeline as an opportunity to finish the YA novel I’d written scraps of four years prior. And this time, I understood that my main character refused each suitor because she was looking another way: at her boarding school classmate, another girl with visions of her own.
The story needed time, and it needed me to be the person I was becoming, the person I was realizing I was, to become what it wanted to be.
Likewise, with my graduate school dissertation, I ended up writing about exactly what occupied my thoughts and feelings throughout those six years: naïveté, not belonging, and how institutions uphold certain kinds of ignorance just as it upholds certain kinds of knowledges.
Life doesn’t always make narrative sense, as Crazy Ex-Girlfriend through Josh Groban reminds us, but for me, narratives can make sense of aspects of life—and narratives, thankfully, can make narrative sense.
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Happy New Year! I hope you can extend kindness to yourself in the year ahead, and feel that you are, in at least some ways, right on time.
Thank you for this - I've felt like I'm not living life in the correct timelines for a while now (especially as I spend more time on Twitter). It's nice to read your perspective on this similar experience and know I'm not alone.