The Article That Launched My Writing Career
By: Fallon Marie Kunz
Photo Credit: Google Images
Have you ever had to be convinced to go do something you thought you couldn’t do? This happened to me a few years ago and turned out to be one of the best experiences of my life.
Several years ago, I enrolled in a distance learning writing class. It was one of those mail-order classes that sometimes are advertised on television. The class was through Longridge Writer’s Group. For a flat fee, I received textbooks for the Writing Children’s Literature course, tuition through the school that offered the class, and individual feedback from a working published author on my work.
Halfway through the course, I was given an assignment to “write a 1,000-word magazine article for your target audience”. I had already told my instructor, Pegi, that I wanted to write for teens and I knew instantly what I wanted my subject to be. This was 2010 and I was a year into recovery from my unspecified eating disorder. It made me angry that the media only tended to discuss Anorexia and Bulimia while willfully ignoring the many other eating disorders that my new friends in my eating disorder support group and I knew were just as dangerous, insidious, and too often-went unnoticed by loved ones and even medical professionals. I wrote a piece called “ED-NOS: The Silent Sickness” about my experience and interviewed a few women in my group. Upon receiving my article, Pegi was ecstatic and wrote back immediately with enthusiastic encouragement telling me I should publish it. I was thrilled but simultaneously terrified. I was barely 22 years old, had never published anything outside of working on my high school’s newspaper for a year, and was incredibly anxious about my introduction to the professional writing world being related to my mental illness.
I told her I’d think about it.
Meanwhile, I took the assignment to trusted friends at my college campus, where I was majoring in music education at the time. They responded with Pegi’s same enthusiasm and hugs of support since many had no idea I was fighting an eating disorder and attending therapy after class. With their support, I gave the piece to my Psychology and English professors, so they could catch any writing or diagnostic errors I may have overlooked in my edits. Still, I wasn’t sure it would be published. Both professors returned with excitement and encouragement and a few minor edits. It was my on-campus therapist who finally pushed me past my self-doubt and anxiety though. She told me during a session that the article had the potential to save lives and to give people the “wake-up call” they needed.
So, I quietly shopped the article around to online magazines and websites. In September of 2010, it was published by Teen Voices Magazine via their WordPress page. I was ecstatic, but I thought that was the end of it. Checkmark! Bucket List made! I was officially a published writer.
Cut to exactly a month later, The National Eating Disorders Association had seen it! They wanted to republish it for their Proud2BMe initiative. The exposure NEDA afforded me boosted my confidence enough for me to apply for a book reviewer job at a well-known psychology website. I worked there for a year, and then on to the next job, and the next.
This summer, I will celebrate 10 years of carving out space for myself in the writing industry. While I’m now in school to be a therapist (That’s a whole other story…) I will always be a writer too. I’ve been a writer and a musician as long as I’ve been able to form words, and I don’t see either of those changing any time soon. Eventually, I would love to write books (novels and maybe easy-to-comprehend non-fiction on mental health) as well as seeing clients.
Sometimes, you just have to listen to your friends. There’s this myth in the world that we writers have some secret magical process we do to get words written. I’m not saying there’s not a place for ritual, routine, and process. That works for some people. If that’s you, great. But the most common thing we all do is simply
START WRITING!
So if you also always have stories in your head. If you are always making up bedtime stories for your children. If you-like me-are a proud nerd concerning all things Disney and have opinions for days on your fandom of choice.
Pick up a pen (or your laptop) and come on this adventure with me, and let me know where it takes you,
Fallon Marie
