Unlearning Fear-Lesson #1

Part One

Lesson #1

Unlearning Fear (Part One)

My official journey to becoming a published author started on New Year’s Eve in 2004 when I mailed (yes, mailed) 15 query letters to literary agents seeking representation for my book. My mother was on one side of me, my husband, Gary, on the other.

“Here’s goes nothing,” I said.

As if they had already rehearsed their lines, each said at the same time, “Here goes everything.”

Within a month’s time, I had an agent (who I still have to this day) and my first book had been sold to Dutton, an imprint of Penguin (before it merged with Random House).

But my journey to that moment started decades earlier.

Writing ain’t easy.

Neither is life.

We’re going to go on a journey together of self-discovery. I am – to use the worst pun in the world – an open book. I’ve turned my emotion – which I was long told was my biggest weakness – into my biggest strength. As you walk, write, laugh and cry with me – week by week and, hopefully, year by year – I will lead you on a journey of both creative- and self-exploration and discovery.

I will share my life and writing lessons on how I became a bestselling author. I will also share with one of my books: America’s Boy, my first book published in 2006, a beautiful, successful memoir which is now out of print (welcome to the life of an author!) and give you inside thoughts and lessons chapter by chapter (how to start, write, finish a book).

Who am I, btw?

I am Wade Rouse (www.violashipman.com and www.waderouse.com )the USA TODAY, Publishers Weekly and #1 internationally bestselling author of 17 books, including five memoirs and twelve novels, including my new Christmas novel, The Wishing Bridge, an instant national bestseller. My books have been translated into nearly 25 languages and have been bestsellers across the world. I chose my grandmother’s name, Viola Shipman, as a pen name to honor the working poor Ozarks seamstress whose sacrifices changed my family’s life and whose memory inspires my fiction. My books have been selected multiple times as Must-Reads by NBC’s Today Show as well as Michigan Notable Books of the Year. My memoirs and novels have been featured in the Washington Post, USA Today and on Chelsea Lately and chosen three times as Indie Next Picks by the nation’s independent booksellers. A noted humorist and memoirist, I was a finalist for the Goodreads Choice Awards in Humor (I lost to Tina Fey) and was named by Writer’s Digest as “The #2 Writer, Dead or Alive, We’d Like to Have Drinks With” (I was sandwiched between Ernest Hemingway and Hunter Thompson).

Why am I telling you this? Not to brag but to let you know this: I am you, and you are me.

I was born and raised in the Missouri Ozarks in the 1970s and 1980s. Did you see the TV show Ozark? Yeah, well, they sugarcoated it. Life was MUCH harder on a young, gay kid who loved to write, read and pop the collars on my Polo shirts. I had a target on my back.

I wanted to be a writer, but – at the time – I mostly wanted to be anyone but myself. My grandmother (my pen name, Viola Shipman), a working poor seamstress who never finished high school or learned to drive, and my mother, a nurse and hospice nurse, took me under their wings, loved me unconditionally (something we will talk about in great detail as we journey together), and taught me that being myself was beautiful and that I should never change. That doesn’t sink in, though, when you’re young, getting your head slammed into a locker and hiding who you are just so you can make it through a day without feeling like you want to end it all.

It doesn’t sink in until you really need it.

All we want is to be accepted and liked. That starts in youth and continues through our lives. But that yawning need for acceptance does awful things to us: We lose our uniqueness. Square pegs wish to fit in round holes. Over time, our edges become dulled. We become swallowed alive by a whale of conformity. We forget the unique beings we once were. And, as writers, souls, artists, we forget to listen to the only things that set us apart in this world: Our voices and our hearts.

We are taught in America to be fearful. We are taught to be scared of life.

“Don’t do this!” “Take the safe route.” “Make your parents happy!”

That leads to unhappy souls.

What was I scared of? Everything.

I grew up gay in rural America in a time before there were not only positive role models but in a time when being gay was demonized and hidden. I wanted to make myself invisible and unavailable to both men and women so I gained weight. I steadily gained through high school and exploded in college.

My only safety valve was my love of books. Writing and reading saved me. I used to take as many books as I could hold from our rural Bookmobile in school, and I lived in the college library. The only way I made sense of my life and a world I often didn’t understand was through writing. I switched, unannounced to my father, from business to communications, joined the college newspaper and began writing a book.

My father was a chemical engineer. When I told him I was majoring in communications in college (which I document in my memoir, Magic Season), he told me, “We all communicate, son. And communicatin’ don’t pay a damn dime.”

I began to doubt myself even more.

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