Candice Hern | Romance Author

From the Fog City Divas Blog Archives

"On the Joys of Getting Paid to Write"
Originally posted by Candice at Dishing With the Divas 2/12/08

I think it is a totally cool thing to get paid for writing, especially to actually make a living at it. Recently, my muse has been giving me grief and I've been struggling, but for the most part, I love to write. I love being a writer.

Though I did not begin writing fiction until I was 40, I had always harbored a love for language. I was a grammar wonk all through school, one of those kids who LOVED to diagram sentences. (Do kids still do that in school?) I remember once in high school taking the longest sentence I could find (I think it might have been from Thomas Hardy) and diagraming it on a huge piece of butcher paper spread across the living room floor. Yes, I was a geek, most often to be found with my nose in a book. (Years and years later, nothing much has changed!) But I was in good company. Gertrude Stein once said: "I really do not know that anything has ever been as exciting as diagramming sentences." Ah, Gertrude!

In all my years in the corporate world, I always wrote -- everything from memos to user manuals to RFPs. I worked in high tech, where technical language was more important than proper English, and I would often shriek at the grammatical errors and such that I found in various documents. So, people started bringing me things to proofread, or sometimes I was asked to help write something from scratch, whether it had anything to do with my own work or not, and I got sort of a reputation as a good writer.

So, in that sense, I have always been a writer. But it wasn't until I sold my first short traditional Regency romance that I became an Author. A novelist. It was a heady feeling, and still is.

But that Regency romance (A Proper Companion, published in 1995) wasn't the first time I'd been paid for my writing. I was reminded recently that I sold my first piece of writing at age 10. My local newspaper had a kid's page every week, and I sent in a poem. They paid me $5 for it! I felt so full of myself that I continued to send them my poems. And they continued to publish them and pay me for them. I still have them, and I thought I'd share one with you. Here is my inaugural effort, my very first paid piece of writing:

JIGSAW PUZZLES
By Candy Hern, age 10 (yes, I was Candy in those days)

Take a jigsaw puzzle
And put a piece in.
If that piece doesn't fit
You take it out again.

You take one more piece
And try to make it fit, too.
But still the pieces won't fit.
How mad it makes you!

So you take another piece,
Another and another,
And try to snap them together
So they will match each other.

But still the pieces won't it!
How humiliating. I quit!

What's really scary about that poem is that I just typed it from memory. Somehow, my very first poem has always stuck in my head. None of the others did, though I have a file full of yellowed newspaper clippings of my little verses. I guess there's something about your first piece of creative writing that sticks with you. Or maybe it was that first $5 check!

When I was about 12, I remember writing, and illustrating, a little book about a boy named Ernest Higgenbotham. But just like today, I had trouble plotting and gave up that story. I stuck to poetry after that, never attempting fiction again for 30 years!

Where would you like to go now?