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No Degree? No Problem

The Myriad Ways to Become a Writer

“The human brain is special. It starts working as soon as you get up and it doesn’t stop until you get to school.”

~ Milton Berle

What if you have the ache to be an author but no credentials? No school newspaper bylines. No teachers calling you “gifted.” No stellar grades in English. Or worse: you got bad grades; your papers returned covered in red ink. A teacher said you’re not gifted.* A writing group sniggered at your early attempts.

Will a publisher tell you to “keep your day job”?

Does going to school for writing matter? Should you think about going back now?

If you’re like me, you grew up in a community steeped in reverence for the university system. Perhaps you were indoctrinated over Cheerios with talk of extra credit, straight A’s, SAT prep classes, and taking as many AP courses as your little brain could hold. The goal: to win over admissions counselors, even if you’d have to sell a kidney to afford tuition.

As trusted systems crash around us, nothing is assured. For me, a student who both loved and hated school, nothing ever was . . .

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“Señorita Tisch!” Señor Gomez yelled across the Spanish II classroom. “You’re one of my brightest students in all my classes, and yet you don’t pay attention. You don’t apply yourself! Whyyyy?

Caught off guard, I froze in my chair, love notes I’d been scripting to my boyfriend, Jeff, ready to make their way down the line of desks. I remember my red face, but not whether I’d answered my eleventh-grade teacher, whom I’d always adored. “What up, Señor G?!” I’d yell across the crowded corridor as we’d pass each other between classes. But if he’d been paying attention, Señor Gomez would have seen that Jeff was far too cute to ignore in the back row and that I was paying plenty of attention. In inglés. Duh.

I was a bookworm, not that anyone would have known it. Never once did I hide under my bed covers with a flashlight, like my sister did, reading an assigned title. Instead, while Carol was off studying and writing another A paper for her Honors English class—show-off—I was wrung out from giving my all to after-school sports. As Mom cooked dinner to a Mozart concerto, and Dad napped following his 4:30 AM start time and evening commute, I’d lie on the floor of our den library and salivate over volume after volume of the hardcovers lining the walls. That’s where Astrology, Near-Death Experiences, Ancient Greece, King Tut’s Egypt, Medieval Armor, the Great Painters of the Renaissance, the Lost City of Atlantis, and Cheese Logs from Bon Appétit magazine came to life. I’d smell the see-through onion-skinned pages of the leather-bound editions of the 1910 Encyclopedia Britannica, with their intricate drawings of Guggenheim’s printing press, and imagine the grinding of the gears, the ooohs and ahhhs of enraptured readers. I prayed that my destiny had something to do with penning books that, like these, stood the test of time.

Despite the fact that I could barely spell, I was proud to be the Cyrano de Bergerac for my girlfriends, begging me to ghostwrite letters to their latest crush. My joy was in the social aspect of school, and athletics. How could I sit still when there were hills to climb on my ten-speed, track meets to run, football games to pom-pom for, tennis matches to win (barefoot on 100-degree courts, thank you very much). Assignments? Who needed them when you could learn the good stuff on your own?

So, how do you go from having every report card since kindergarten declaring, “Linda has a hard time sitting still,” and “She talks too much,” to fulfilling your dream to enter a world that’s as totally sane and respectable and quiet and intellectual as writing? Could committing to school help with that? I wasn’t sure it was worth the soul-selling risk. My mother had taken me to a holiday party where she worked at Stanford University. After making small talk with a bunch of gossipy complaining PhDs, I walked away thinking, Personality much? Even Stanford couldn’t teach joy.

I managed to get to college (despite being very distracted by a wickedly cute water-polo-playing frat boy at the USC Beta house), yet somehow didn’t visit those counselors enough to realize I was three years in and REEEEALLY should’ve taken certain courses right after those other ones (Algebra 2 follows Algebra 1, Spanish 3 follows Spanish 2), or the info mysteriously falls right out of your brain, and you’ll never be able to catch up. And, whoops! The major I’d chosen, Psychology, required Calculus and Statistics, which I’d already dropped twice, each, on account of not remembering any Algebra. When a teacher mentioned I’d need another four years after this to ever make any money with my psych degree, I quit. Yeah, with just three classes to go. I’d become an entrepreneur and a writer. I could see it. Why waste another penny of my parents’ money?

My ever-supportive mom and dad were game. “I never worry about you,” Dad said. “You always land on your feet.”

Over the years, my lifelong dream to write grew fierce. I finally admitted to myself that it was time and was keyed up about an actual project—but aside from having no training or credentials, there was just one more little problem. I didn’t know how to write. Raw talent was one thing, but craft was harder than I’d bargained for. Growing up, I’d figured that, unlike my sister, I’d be a kid while I was a kid (wasn’t that the point of childhood?). Looking at Carol all sleepless and hunched over her desk, I trusted that scripting my real-life experience would one day come as naturally as biking, running, or smashing tennis balls around. We have time. We’re all going to be successful anyway!

I sure as shit didn’t want to have to go back to school to write. I could figure it out. Books were in my DNA. The shelves of my childhood home groaned with them. Mom had been the president of a book club for ten years and a founding member for longer. One of her best friends, Kay Sprinkel Grace (yes, her real name—and yes, she does), was a famous nonprofit fundraiser with many books to her name, one of which was dedicated to my parents. My father’s best friend, Charles Sailor, was a big-time New York Times bestselling author who sold millions of books and lived in fancy Bel Air and wrote screenplays and hit TV shows. Carol and I had driven around with “Uncle Chuck” in a limousine on his book tour for The Second Son and marveled at how the biggest names in Hollywood—Newman, Redford, Stallone—wanted to bring that book to film. I was even more dazzled by the bulging canvas sacks carrying fan letters to his house by the tens of thousands from the post office. If I could be like him, I thought, I’d really have the power to help this world!

This writing thing couldn’t be that hard. Everyone’s doing it!

But Carol, who got annoyingly good grades, graduated a year early from high school, won a statewide journalism award at eighteen, and got into the USC Journalism school, scoffed at my first try:

“Why do you have six commas in every sentence, Linda?”

“I put one in whenever someone pauses,” I answered.

“That’s not how grammar works,” she said. “People have to breathe!”

Luckily, I’m a Leo, and we’re super driven, even grandiose. I was on a mission. I. Would. Figure. This. Out. And I did—although not without having to work through a lot of shame and guilt around leaving school. Thankfully, Dad lived long enough to see the release of my first book, the cover of which he had emblazoned on a T-shirt surrounded by black lettering: “Got my daughter’s book yet?” But when he was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer not long afterward, just five years after we’d already lost Mom to the dreaded disease, I was desperate to make good on the promise I’d made to them when I’d enrolled at USC—that I’d graduate. All I had to do was convince my former dean to agree to a trade. Seemed simple enough.

If I could give my father the assurance that I’d walk across that commencement stage after all, he’d have to live to celebrate that long-deferred milestone, right? You hear it all the time, people practically rising from the dead to attend some extraordinary event they’d never miss. And, if it were too late for him to witness the ceremony, at the very least he’d go to his grave knowing that his and Mom’s sacrifices weren’t in vain.

Universities sometimes grant college credits for work experience. Surely the writing I’d published and consulted on would cover the three measly courses I was missing. Arriving at USC, I checked my reflection in my rearview mirror and prayed I was worthy of the special circumstance.

I barely breathed as the dean reviewed my transcripts, examined my first book, and paged through magazine articles I’d laid out for her.

“And I’m halfway finished with my second book, a title I’m co-authoring for a blind cop,” I said, breaking the silence. “He was shot in the face at a highway drug checkpoint. He’s a PhD, a therapist for police, fire, and military personnel, so I’m using many of the lessons I learned here in my psych courses.”

The dean looked down, shook her head. She took her glasses off, closed her eyes.

“I’m so sorry, Linda. Maybe if you’d published a math book in Spanish”—the third class I’d dropped—“or written a psych textbook, perhaps we could count that as course—”

“I just hoped I’d qualify because my writing is so psychological.”

“I’m sorry,” she repeated and began to gather my magazines into a tidy stack.

She spent the next half hour outlining my options, which mostly amounted to investing years and tens of thousands of dollars on tuition and tutors before I could even think of donning a cap and gown.

Walking through the quad in a defeated daze, I felt as old as the very bricks of Doheny Library. I sat down at the feet of the famed Tommy Trojan statue, where many years prior, I’d been photographed for the cover of the 1998 USC Trojans Gift Catalog. Mom and Dad loved that. “Tell me something good,” my father would always say when he saw my name on his caller ID, believing I had “God’s phone number.” I rummaged for my cell and dialed his number.

“Daddy,” I said, my voice cracking upon hearing his. “I’m here at ’SC. I’m going to get my degree.”

“Are you doing this for me?” he asked, his voice shaky. I pictured him in his kitchen, his past surgeries to his jaw and mouth making it physically hard for him to speak.

“Yes. But I want to,” I lied.

A pause. “Linda, no. Not for me. The reason I wanted you to go to college was so that you could be happy and successful. So you could thrive. You are the happiest, most successful, thriving person I know.” For once, I was rendered speechless. Should I remind him that I still sometimes struggle to pay my bills? “Besides,” Dad continued. “It’s going to take you years.” He was right about that. The dean had said it would take at least three . . .

“And in that time, how many books will you not write that would have helped how many people?” Silent rain fell from my eyes.

“Look around,” he said. “How many students do you see on campus right now?” I couldn’t count that fast. It seemed like thousands. “How many of them will write books? Most of them will graduate, but how many of them will write books that change people’s lives?”

“I don’t know, Daddy.”

“I free you, sweetheart. Let it go.”

The sun dipped into the sea behind me as I drove east on the Pasadena freeway toward home. I’d soon be rejoining my sister, Carol, to be with Dad in his last days, but I felt grateful. Only hours before, I believed I’d squandered my education and my parents’ hard-earned money, let them down, let the system down, let myself down. Now, thanks to Dad’s benediction, I could remember my college years and once again smile. And, unlike my father, I had time for a fresh rewrite, a new personal narrative about who I was and what I was capable of. Here I’d thought I was going to give Dad a gift, but he gave me one worth so much more.

My father understood that a classroom setting wasn’t the only place from which to gain wisdom—or to pursue the dream of writing. As Mark Twain said, “I have never let schooling get in the way of my education.” Yet, for many of us, high school or college were sources of shame and discouragement. Some let a lack of credentials stop them from pursuing their writing dreams. Some allowed grades to determine their worth. Others took writing classes or pursued an MFA in hopes that the degree would pave an easier path to talent and publication, and (of course!) it sometimes did. The successful writers in this book span from degreeless to teaching at the university level, yet one thing they all have in common is the universal desire to share what’s in their heart.

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I hope it goes without saying that if you’re currently enrolled in college or plan to go, more power to you! When my son threatened several times to quit film school, despite the debt I was racking up, I was having none of it.

“But, Mom!” he’d whine. “You and Dad didn’t finish college!” True. But looking at my kid, I saw a young man who needed structure, a place where people expected him to show up, connections I didn’t have, and new philosophies. Hardly a week goes by—eight years later—that he doesn’t thank me for forcing him to finish.

Many people, past and present, knock college. In Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, “I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests, the library was open, unending, free.” Ray Bradbury, who read EVERY book in the library over ten years, was also not a fan of colleges and universities, believing that teachers held prejudices, but libraries never did. But no one can deny that, particularly for people in rural areas or developing nations, higher education can be the most reliable ticket out of the poverty that steals time, motivation, opportunity, and creative drive.

Far be it from me to knock MFAs; the do-it-yourself way can take a lot longer! When it comes to college, there’s no right answer, only a wrong one. The wrong answer is believing you must have a degree to write. Degree or no degree, I believe one truth: We writers long to share our stories because there is a path forward for us. Don’t worry. As you’re about to see, if writing and publishing scare you, you’re far from alone. Moreover, you can always borrow some of my father’s faith in me. I carry it close, but there’s plenty to go around.

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*To be fair, not every bookworm with a history of being teased as “Teacher’s Pet” feels 100 percent ready to go public either.

*Fun fact: Tom studied theater at Chabot College in Hayward, CA, and transferred to Cal State University, Sacramento. In 2010, TIME magazine named Tom one of the “Top 10 College Dropouts.”

*Fun fact: At twenty-three, Tomi received one of the biggest young adult publishing deals ever, including preemptive film rights sales to Fox/Disney/Lucasfilm. Paramount Pictures now has the rights to the series and Tomi will write the screenplay and executive produce the adaptation.