Author's Notes on: Getting Here

So... Do authors have origin stories?

Hello writers and readers! My name is Madeline M. Dunsmore. I’m a self-published author out of California, and as of writing this, I am 21 years old with four books published through Amazon and more on the way. I’ve been writing for most of my life but only started officially publishing since around 2018, and thinking about that is honestly a little crazy. So, to kick off the start of Author’s Notes, I thought I should share how exactly I got here in the first place, in the hopes that it might inspire more people to take up writing as a hobby or even as part of their profession.

As far back as I can remember, I’ve always been fascinated by stories. The second I was able to read on my own, that was it. I was set loose on the world as a hungry book dragon (a bookwyrm, if you will), and there wasn’t a single work of fiction that didn’t catch my ravenous gaze. I tore through books like wildfire, and the ones that were mine to keep were added to my bookshelf as an ever-growing hoard.

Reading is one of the best ways to get started writing, in my opinion. Read anything and everything that interests you. Fill the nooks and crannies of your life with whatever stories interest you the most. Read with reckless abandon. Immerse yourself in novels, short stories, audiobooks, articles about topics you care about, fanfiction about your favorite media, literally anything and everything that sparks your imagination or passion. Moreover, watch movies, play video games that have stories in them, and try out tabletop RPGs. Do anything and everything that feeds your imagination. Get scared! Go on adventures! Fall in love with fictional people! And most importantly, remember these moments. Remember your adventures. Remember how stories made you feel. Even if you’re not able to pick out exactly how an author or screenwriter did it, it’ll give you a huge head start on figuring out how to create those elements in your own stories.

Not long after I started reading, I started writing. Most of the old stories I remember were fairly simple, but sometime during elementary school, I started to experiment with “long-form” fiction, like the stuff I’d been reading. I quickly honed in on the fantasy genre — almost everything I wrote when I was that age revolved around a simple structure: a girl my age led a boring life until some kind of magical intervention swept her up into a high-stakes quest in a fantastical land. A lot of it took very clear and heavy inspiration from the books I’d read most recently or generally continued to adore. I wrote about magical horses, talking snow leopards, shapeshifters, dragons, and everything in between. Most of it wasn’t incredibly cohesive or original, and I picked up and discarded story threads on a whim, but it was a start.

Never underestimate the power of just letting your imagination run wild, especially if you’re just starting out. Feel free to experiment with characters, settings, genre, and anything else you can think of. Play around with your favorite tropes, no matter how cliche. Don’t be afraid to write things other people may never see, and never be ashamed of the places you draw inspiration from. Inspiration can come from anywhere, and any form of art or literature born of love is much needed in the world.

I also cannot express how important it is to find other people that enjoy this kind of stuff. You still CAN write a book without anyone to talk about it with, but trust me, having someone to talk to makes it a whole lot easier. I’ve had a lot of wonderful friends over the years and I really doubt I could have gotten where I am without their love and support.

Skipping ahead to middle school, in sixth grade, I was introduced to the Young Authors Competition. The premise was simple: write a book 10+ pages long, it’ll get judged, and if you win they’ll bind it and people can buy copies of it. It seemed fun, but I was very self-conscious about showing my work to anyone. I had been working on the aforementioned shapeshifter book for years by that point — it spanned roughly 170 handwritten pages across three different notebooks, not including an extensive set of maps and art. It wasn’t even close to being finished, but I was very proud.

So naturally, I didn’t submit that.

Instead, I wrote something new: Jackals of the Night, a thrilling tale of an odd group of friends led by a girl that was actually secretly running from a group of shapeshifters. Her past inevitably caught up to her, and things went downhill from there.

(You might start to see a pattern here. Especially if you’ve read anything I’ve published.)

In total, the full text of Jackals was only 11 pages long, complete with a climactic cliffhanger and a “To Be Continued” note at the end. It managed to be one of the winning entries that year, and still stands on my shelf today. The entire book, binding and all, is thinner than my pinkie finger.

I look back on Jackals with a lot of mixed feelings, even to this day. It’s not the worst thing I’ve ever written, but it has a lot of rookie mistakes. It was written on printer-paper-sized pages in 10-12 point font, and some of the paragraphs are STILL massive chunks that take up whole pages at a time! The setting and premise were also a mess in ways that are too complicated to explain here, and it contains far more stiff and cringe dialogue than 11 pages ought to be able to.

…But it was the first thing I ever submitted to Young Authors. People liked it, and I had friends even through high school that kept poking me about finishing it. I may not be extremely proud of it these days, and it may never get finished, but without that book as the catalyst, I don’t think I would have gone on to start publishing.

I didn’t submit anything the next year. I think I was scared it wouldn’t win. I told myself I was just giving myself time to finish the shapeshifter book, but the reality was just that I didn’t want to be disappointed if people liking Jackals was a fluke. I’m only so sure of this because it’s the same feeling I get after every book I write, even now. There’s always the creeping feeling that maybe I’ll never be able to finish a book again, or that I’ve somehow cheated my way into the praise I was given.

It’s hard to fight it sometimes. Saying I don’t deserve it feels self-defeating, but standing my ground that I do deserve it feels incredibly egotistical. I feel like I work very hard on these books and do everything in my power to make them good, but there’s always a voice in the back of my mind insisting that I could’ve done more. It’s a struggle I may carry forever.

I honestly wasn’t going to submit anything the year after that either, for the same reason. When the season rolled around where it was in the announcements every week though, I started to have second thoughts. I’d been periodically posting chapters of a story onto a forum with a bunch of friends who enjoyed roleplaying. The story was a passion project, something I made to fill out a missing year in my character’s backstory. My friends loved it, and encouraged me to at least submit it and see what happened.

The initial submission wasn’t even finished yet, but by some miracle… it won. They give you a period of about a month to edit, revise, and polish, which I used to finish the book just in time for it to be submitted and bound.

Fun fact, they made a rule after that year — I can only assume because of me — that all initial submissions needed to be finished copies.

This book was Athena’s Untold Story, which I eventually returned to years later to publish through Amazon. It was re-published unedited from the version I made in 8th grade, at the request of my mother. There’s a lot of things I wouldn’t do the same way now that I know better, but changing anything so long after the fact carried the risk of it just not feeling like the same book anymore.

People loved it. The Young Authors copies that were made were passed around my family to their family and friends, and even read to some of their kids. The reception was better than I could have ever imagined.

So from that year on, I participated annually in Young Authors, producing four additional works in high school: The Seventh Moon’s Rise in 9th grade, The Cold Breath of Autumn in 10th, Beneath Still Waters in 11th, and finally, People of the Anthill in 12th. Of these, all but The Seventh Moon’s Rise were eventually returned to and published through Amazon.

I have a lot to say about each of these books — so much more than I can reasonably fit here — but the main point is that once the ball was rolling, it was harder to stop it than to keep going.

I went back and forth on whether or not I should try to actually get published for a long time. I’d always been a writer first, then an author. If I made writing my job, I was scared I would grow to resent it. Writing had been my passion for years and losing it would break my heart. But at the same time, if I could make money doing something I loved, wouldn’t that be the dream? It wasn’t likely, but it was at least worth a try, right?

I found out about a program called Createspace (which has since been changed to KDP), which allowed you to publish through Amazon. I decided my sophomore year Young Author’s submission should be the first to be adapted, as it was the closest to the general type of book I wanted to write. So, my mom and I took The Cold Breath of Autumn and went over it with a fine-toothed comb several times, trying to work out any inconsistencies, grammatical errors, and so on. We edited the book, I did the art, and after much blood, sweat, tears, and doubt, it was finally done. I hit publish, and was able to order physical copies for myself.

It was surreal seeing my book as a real paperback novel. It was hard to believe that I’d actually made something physical, and that it was there in my hands. And honestly, I didn’t know what to do from there. It felt right to tell people, but I didn’t want to come off as being self-important. My first class was English, so I took the book with me to school and showed my teacher. I hadn’t been planning on bringing it up to anyone else except for the other people in the after-school Writing Club.

She was ecstatic. She told the entire class about it and read the back cover aloud to the class. I may be wrong, but I think she sent an email out to all the school staff as well, because by the time I got to my next class, THAT teacher already knew too. Soon it seemed everyone on campus knew.

I got a ton of questions and praise from classmates and teachers alike. Not long after, we got into contact with a local newspaper who ended up doing a story about me. I got asked to sign several copies of The Cold Breath of Autumn for various teachers and classmates. It didn’t feel real. Thinking back on it, it still doesn’t feel real.

A smarter woman would have ridden that hype train directly into publishing the other books while the excitement was fresh, but doubt set in and I took a long while to get Beneath Still Waters, Athena’s Untold Story, and People of the Anthill out. Though I had help from my mom editing at first, most of it was done by myself — writing, editing, art, descriptions, and so on. Eventually, I was doing it entirely by myself.

A smarter (and richer) woman also probably would’ve gotten on board with paying an artist to make the covers, and getting an editor to help catch all those pesky grammatical errors and plot holes that slipped through the cracks no matter how hard I tried.

I am unfortunately nothing if not a stubborn woman, so I have continued to be solely responsible for the production of these books. It’s hard, but I like to think there’s a certain kind of charm in a one-woman operation — and I love doing it, even if it comes with its hardships.

Writing used to feel like a physical necessity. I would get scenes or dialogue stuck in my mind on a loop, and the only thing that would bring me peace would be to write it down. It still happens every now and then, but definitely not with the same frequency, and writing it down doesn’t often break that loop and ease my mind like it used to. Life crept in. College crept in. 

Doubt crept in.

(You may have noticed a pattern with that by now.)

But I kept going. And it hurt. It was hard. Sometimes I hated it. It got hard to concentrate on writing at all. Sometimes my head was full of ideas that just refused to get down on the page, and other times I was completely blank. Editing was even worse. I ran myself over the coals daily with so many questions in mind — if I really wanted this, why wasn’t I doing it? Why was I letting myself get distracted? Why was I playing games or working on anything other than getting these books done? Why couldn’t I just concentrate?

To the surprise of nobody, hating myself for not doing the things I wanted to get done didn’t help. And believe it or not, but hating myself FOR hating myself also didn’t help. What finally helped was accepting that the way I’d written for years just wasn’t the way that was going to work anymore. What finally helped was adapting the way I wrote.

For years I had written from the seat of my pants. I had a premise and just let the characters guide me through whatever events felt right. I didn’t know what was coming in the next chapter better than anyone else. …But for whatever reason, that didn’t work anymore. So I learned how to outline, planning out a multi-act structure, and lining up story beats where they felt most appropriate. I got into using spreadsheets to plan out and color code which plot points from which arcs went where.

I noticed that sometimes I functioned best when I broke my stories into smaller parts that could be written and edited individually (usually chapter by chapter), as opposed to making changes on one large master document. I also noticed that sometimes, having too many small documents made one ~25 chapter book seem like 25 different tasks, which got overwhelming. So, I started keeping two folders for any book I worked on: one contained the master document, while the other contained the book broken into as many chapters as I’d planned. This way, so long as I remembered to update anything I changed between both folders, I could choose how to work depending on what felt less overwhelming that particular day.

On days where checklists worked, I used checklists. When I could trick my brain into working by jotting down notes or passages in a new or separate program, or by talking to friends, I did.

So, how did I get here?

I got here because I didn’t listen to anyone that told me I couldn’t do it, including myself. I got here through determination and drive. I got here by feeding my imagination. I got here because getting self-published is absolutely accessible and attainable no matter your age or experience.

Very importantly, I got here because I had a supportive web of people that wanted to see me chase my dreams. I got here because when I risked it all and put myself and my books out there, they were there to cheer me on.

But most importantly, I didn’t get here by gritting my teeth and plowing straight on through when I was having trouble. I took a step back, thought about it, and adapted. I got used to the idea that the things that worked some days wouldn’t work on others, and that was okay.

Ultimately, that’s part of why I’m starting Author’s Notes, and part of why I don’t intend for these letters to be directly concerned with giving readers tips so much as explaining how I go about various writing-related topics. The fact of the matter is just that we’re all different. We all experience the world differently. If the things that work for me work for you, great! Feel free to try any of my methods if you’re having similar problems. And if they don’t? That’s perfectly okay. That’s just what it means to be human.

I’m not here to run down a step-by-step list of how to write a book or give tips and tricks to elevate your latest masterpiece. I’m not here to pretend like I am an expert or that I have all the answers, because I don’t.

I’m here to say that whoever you are, if there are worlds beyond our own that exist in your mind, and if their stories ache to be told, tell them. I’m here to encourage you to revel in the creative process in whatever way works best for you.

And if you do want to get those stories published, I’m here to tell you: You can do it.

No matter what hardships you may encounter, no matter what complications may lie in wait, regardless of if you work chapter by chapter or have to go letter by letter — You can do it.

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If you’ve made it this far, thanks for joining me for the first edition of Author’s Notes! Subscribe to be notified when more content comes out, and if you want to see my books, check the link below!