Stumbling Into a Dream

I never thought I would be a writer. As a young girl, I dreamed of winning the Olympic Gold Medal as a figure skater. I even spent three years living away from home at a training camp in Colorado Springs. When I was sixteen and my talents fell short, I looked for a new dream.

Wall Street was booming then (mid-1980s) so I decided to become an investment banker. I turned my focus to school, gaining admission to Brown University where I studied Economics. From there, I landed a coveted job at Goldman Sachs. I was determined to make this my lifelong profession, but other interests soon caught my attention. I began to notice the world around me and the impact social policy had on people’s lives, including my own as a young woman.

After two years, I went to law school with a new dream of working in the public interest arena. Like many law students, I figured I would work off my student loans at a big firm with corporate clients before finally pursuing what would surely be a lasting career in the non-profit world.

Time, however, was, not on my side. By age twenty-eight, I again shifted my focus – this time to the dream of starting a family. In full nesting mode, my husband and I moved to the suburbs of Connecticut where we both had grown up, and where we still had extended family. I found work at a smaller law firm and within three years, we had our first child.

Like so many life choices we make when we are young, I did not foresee the long- term consequences of the decisions I was making. I felt empowered by my past reinventions and career pivots, so I became a stay-home mother for what I thought would be a few short years. Until my kids are all in school, I told myself. Then I did the math. It would be over a decade until that day would come.

I loved being home with my kids more than I had imagined, so another dream was born – this time out of sheer necessity. I had to find a way to work from home. I came up with the brilliant plan to write a novel. This was my thinking: John Grisham was a lawyer and he became a bestselling author. I’m a lawyer, so … how hard could it be?

For ten years, I wrote everywhere – even in the back of my minivan outside my children’s pre-school. I sought help from a local writing professor, sent out over eighty-five query letters to agents, and eventually, got two novels published. I thought I had done it! I thought I was done reinventing myself to chase new dreams. I thought I was done dreaming, period.

But, not quite. When my oldest son was ten, I became a single mother with two “underperforming” novels and a rusty law degree.

Anxiety set in. Fear came on its heels. I knew I would have to reinvent myself again, this time in pursuit of steady income, regardless of my interests. I sought advice from everyone I still knew in the legal profession, and was given a volunteer job in family law where I could exchange my time for retraining. As it turned out, my life experience had value in this field. I understood what life was like as a divorced woman in the suburbs, and clients found that comforting. Within the year, I was an employed divorce attorney. I was able to breathe again.

Back on my feet with a solid road ahead of me, the dream of working from home sneaked back in. To my surprise, I also realized that I had fallen in love with writing! Years had passed. I no longer had an agent or a publisher. I had to start all over. One page here, one page there, a new novel was eventually written. This time, I had enough contacts in the writing world to find an agent without having to query. We worked together for an entire year revising and assessing the market. Because I already had two strikes against me with the prior novels, my re-entry had to be spot on. At the end of that year, she told me that this new novel was not the right one.

After seven years of being a single mom, a lawyer and an unpaid writer, I was exhausted. I didn’t know if I had finally reached the end of all this dream chasing – if I was being persistent or chasing a ghost. I had to know for sure. Taking the advice of my agent, I scrapped the novel that had taken two years to write and revise, and tried my hand at a psychological thriller. It was going to be my last book. I cleared my schedule at work and wrote every day for six weeks. After seventeen years of writing, I produced a novel that became a bestseller. My dream came true in the eleventh hour.

Looking back, it was not careful planning that led me to the life I wanted, and the career I fell in love with. It was pursuing a series of dreams in the face of obstacles and failures, and learning when to let go of one dream and find another. I don’t know what the future holds. But this long journey has taught me some very valuable lessons.

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Wendy Walker is the author of the national and international bestseller All is Not Forgotten (St. Martin’s Press 2016), and Emma In The Night (St. Martin’s Press 2017). Her latest work, The Night Before, will be released in May, 2019. She has sold rights to her books in twenty-three languages as well as film and television options. Prior to her writing career, Wendy practiced both corporate and family law, having earned her J. D. from Georgetown University Law Center and her undergraduate degree from Brown University. Wendy also worked as a financial analyst at Goldman, Sachs & Co.  Wendy is currently finishing her fourth thriller and managing a busy household in Fairfield County, Connecticut where she lives with her three sons.

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing