Free Making of a Writer (9780307820464) by Joan Lowery Nixon

writing, and I want someday to have a job I love?”
    Daddy nodded, his decision made. “We’ll let you major in journalism, if you’re going to insist,” he said. “But we won’t allow you to become a newspaper reporter.” He lowered his voice and looked stern. “They drink,” he repeated.
    I had no desire to drink. My desire was to write. And now that I had a definite goal in mind, I was eager to reach it.
    I began my first semester at the University of Southern California at the age of seventeen, in June 1944, one week after I graduated from high school.

Chapter Twenty-three
    To graduate U.S. Navy and U.S. Marine Corps officers as quickly as possible, the University of Southern California offered three sixteen-week semesters a year, instead of two. I chose to begin classes as soon as possible instead of taking a long summer off.
    On the first day, I brought my lunch in a paper bag, as I had done in high school. I sat on a bench outside by myself, not knowing a single soul at the university, and tried not to notice the strange looks passersby were giving me. Brown-bagging your lunch to college was not the thing to do. Nobody had invented the term “cool” yet—not even Nancy Monegan and me—but I was decidedly not cool.
    I managed to survive my embarrassment, eating lunch at a drugstore lunch counter off campus until I discoveredthat the nonmilitary students ate in the student union and in a campus restaurant called the Wooden Horse. And I was soon in great athletic shape—not because I was a member of a sports team, but because my freshman journalism class was on the fourth floor of the student union, where the newspaper offices were situated.
    We composed everything we wrote on typewriters, even taking our exams on typewriters. This was fine with me because I had learned to type in seventh grade, and I had discovered a direct line from the creative part of my brain that ran down my arms and came out through my fingers. Composing on a typewriter was always what I did best.
    In Journalism 101 I was given the same rules of writing that I had learned from Mrs. Ammons. I knew them by heart and, even though I was a lowly freshman and not eligible to write yet for
The Daily Trojan
, I was eager to work on my journalistic skills.
    One afternoon, as I walked up the hill to our house, I picked up our mail, which was delivered to the box at the bottom of the driveway. As I tossed the mail onto the kitchen table, I dropped and then picked up a small magazine called
The Ford Times
. It was a magazine sent monthly to people who had purchased Ford automobiles.
    Normally I wasn’t at all interested in reading the magazine, but on that particular day I thumbed through it and noticed an invitation to readers to send in short articles about how they and their families used Ford cars.
    I sat down at the typewriter, put myself into my mother’s shoes, and wrote a few paragraphs about how my husband and I entertained our three young children on short trips in our Ford sedan.
    I revised and polished what I had written, then typed aclean copy with my name and address. I mailed it to the magazine’s editor.
    About three weeks later, after I had forgotten I’d written the article, I received a letter from the editor of
The Ford Times
. He thanked me for my submission, told me it would be published, and enclosed a check. As I remember, it was for twenty-five dollars.
    My legs wobbled, so I quickly sat down, staring in astonishment at the check. I had been paid for something I had written. I hadn’t written a book. It was only a short article. But I had been paid. Just like Mrs. Jones. Just like Ernest Hemingway and Agatha Christie and the authors of all the books I’d ever read. And just like the fiction and nonfiction writers in
McCall’s
and
Ladies’ Home Journal
and the newspaper reporters of the
Los Angeles Times
. I was exactly what I had always wanted to be. I was a published writer!

Epilogue
    I had four little children