We recently connected with Alexandria Faulkenbury and have shared our conversation below.

Alexandria, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you walk us through some of the key steps that allowed you move beyond an idea and actually launch?

I have always wanted to be a writer, but actually getting a full manuscript complete took a long time. And once it was finally complete, the process of finding a publisher took a long time as well. From the initial query letter to my publishing contract was about a year and a half.

It can be frustrating to work so long on a project and then hear nothing but silence for a long time, but that is very common when writers are starting out. I had a few close calls early on, which made it feel like an even longer wait, but also made the yes I finally got that much more exciting.

Looking back, I realize that I made a lot of mistakes and probably started querying the novel a little too soon. There’s all this advice out there to wait until you are absolutely ready to query, and I think there’s truth to that. However, it’s also true that you can’t know what you don’t know. In other words, I could have waited longer to query but I don’t know that waiting or reading more advice or revising my query would have given me the same understanding and learning that I gained from jumping into the query trenches and getting a few rejections under my belt.

Alexandria, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I’ve always written since I was in Kindergarten, but in college and grad school I shifted away from writing fiction into more analytical writing. It wasn’t until after my daughter started pre-school that I found time to get back into writing fiction.

I love writing fiction because it allows you to immerse yourself in another world and tinker with problems you might be facing in the read world in a more granular way. I also really enjoy the revision process of writing. Most first drafts are pretty terrible so to be able to polish a piece of writing and make it shine always feels like magic to me.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

I thought I had to follow all the writing advice I ever saw or read but had to unlearn that as I developed my own writing process. Every writer is different and you never know what is going to work for you until you try it. It’s important to read craft books and to hear about other writers’ process, but your process is yours alone. I had to learn to follow my instincts and do what worked for me even when it didn’t look exactly like what I’d read in a book or online. Every writer is unique and everyone comes to writing at a different stage in their life. That requires you to meet your writing process where you are and find a flow that is sustainable and enjoyable rather than trying to do what everyone else is doing.

Are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?

I didn’t have a huge community of support when I started writing, and I wish I had developed that first. I would recommend any writer just starting out to seek out community with other writers. It’s so important to keep you going and have someone who you can share the ups and downs and joys and sorrows of the writing life with. Your writing community will be the first to support and cheer you on and the ones you can’t wait to cheer for in return. Some great places to find a writing community include writing groups through your local library and online communities that can connect you with writers all over the world. The #WritingCommunity is big on social media and I’ve also met great friends through #MomsWritersClub and #5amWritersClub

Contact Info:

• Website: https://alexandriafaulkenbury.com
• Twitter: @lexibury

Image Credits

all photos my own