Save the date! The 100-for-100 writing challenge starts on Monday, June 12th!

This is the most popular event we host every year, and I’m very excited to bring it back. If you’re unfamiliar with the 100-for-100, this is a community challenge to write 100 words a day everyday for 100 days. 100 words is pretty short. It’s about a paragraph long and should only take about ten minutes to complete. But at the end of the 100 days, you’ll have added 10,000 words to your manuscript, even if you do the bare minimum. This challenge is a free event and registration open Wednesday, May 31st!

I hear from a lot of young writers who have the goal of getting published before they graduate high school. This was my goal in high school too! I started sending out manuscripts to publishers when I was a junior. My book was terrible. I’m fairly sure it wasn’t even long enough to be considered a novel, but I didn’t know any better. (I thought I’d invented young adult fiction. That’s how ignorant I was.)

Though I didn’t get published in my teens like I’d hoped, I still signed my first contract at age twenty-four, which is relatively young for a debut author. I was able to achieve this in my early twenties because of work I’d been doing since my teen years.

Here are ten things I did in my teens that helped me get published:

I wrote. A lot.

Maybe you think this is a no-brainer, but I’m not so sure it is. Because I meet a decent amount of writers who love to talk about writing, read about writing, and plan time for writing, but then fail to actually write.

I wrote a lot in high school. Often when I should’ve been paying attention in class. (Though I can’t remember the last time I used geometry in my real life, so maybe my choice there was fine.)

In Stephen King’s book On Writing, he says, “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.”

Most of the reading I did in high school was required reading, because I didn’t know yet how to find books for myself. But I did almost always have a story that I was actively writing.

I focused on writing and editing.

When I say this, I mean “as opposed to building my website, growing my social media following, etc.”

Part of this is just the blessing of the era I was raised in. There was no temptation for me to blog or obsess about social media, because it didn’t exist when I was in high school. The indie publishing revolution hadn’t happened yet, so I wasn’t tempted to self publish my so-not-ready books.

This means that I was completely focused on learning how to grow as a writer. How to develop better characters and plots. How to finish a first draft. How to edit something as massive as a novel. Spending several years focusing on my craft (and a tiny bit on how to find an agent) paid off for me.

I never said “if I get published.”

I should have doubted. I grew up in Kansas City, and while I adore my hometown, we’re not a literary mecca. I knew no other writers, and I’d never achieved anything in writing aside from the occasional “A” on an five-paragraph essay. I really should have doubted that I would get published.

But I didn’t. I sometimes worried it would take longer than I wanted, but in my head it was always “when I get published.” I think that kept me stubbornly on my path, inching toward my goal, even when it became clear to me that getting published was complicated. (If you’re unfamiliar with the process, here’s a overview of traditional publishing.)

I went to a writers conference.

My mom happened to see that there was a one-day writing conference happening in town, hosted by a community college. I was a senior in high school, so I took the day off school, asked my dad to come with me, and nervously attended classes and meetings with grown-up writers and industry professionals. I asked questions. I shared when instructors asked for volunteers. I approached an editor after class to ask a submissions question.

Did anything lasting come out of that conference? Not really. But I did walk away feeling like this literary world wasn’t so impenetrable as it had seemed before.

I took every opportunity offered to me to learn more about stories.

I went to a small high school, which meant limited class options. During my junior and senior years when my schedule opened up, I took all the English electives I could—Shakespeare, Lit into Film, Creative Writing, and possibly one more that I can’t remember. Any class that has you studying stories is a good thing. While I didn’t have a large catalog of classes to choose from, I took the opportunities available to me.

I listened to people who knew more than me.

I cannot tell you how many times aspiring writers have asked me questions about how to become an author or how to get an agent, and then spend most of our conversation pushing back on what I say or explaining to me why they’re the exception.

Or sometimes people don’t ask at all. The example of this that still blows my mind comes from a few years ago when my husband invited his friend and his friend’s wife over for dinner. I’d never met the wife before, and she was nice, but quiet and challenging for me to talk to. A few weeks later, I was shocked to learn that her greatest aspiration was to be a YA novelist. She knew what I did for a living, she was at my house for multiple hours, and she never asked me a single thing. Maybe she’d already read my books and hated them, but even still I’m baffled by this situation.

When I was first starting out and knew no one, I would’ve paid money to be able to sit down with a writer in any genre and learn from them. Eventually that’s what I did! That’s what writing conferences are. But it’s never been easier than it is now to learn from published authors, agents, and editors. Stalk industry people on Twitter. Read blogs and comment. Learn from those who know more than you.

And don’t be ashamed that you’re just starting. None of us were born published authors.

I focused on the next step.

I became really good at identifying my next step and focusing on that. When I finished writing my manuscript, I thought the next step was to mail the book to publishers. When I did that and it didn’t go well, I got online to figure out how to submit better. I discovered the phrase “no unsolicited manuscripts,” meaning if they didn’t ask for it, they didn’t want to see it unless it came from a literary agent. Then I knew my next step was finding a literary agent. I asked my mom to take me to the library so that I could access books that had lists of literary agents in them.

I had a big goal of being published, and I wasn’t entirely sure how to get there, so I just took what seemed like the next logical step. Sometimes I was wrong about the next step, but that’s part of learning!

What’s the next step for you? Is it writing a full book? Is it editing a full book? Is it saving up money for a conference? Whatever your next step is, focus on it, not all those other ones down the road.

I wrote fan fiction.

This is seriously one of the best things I ever did for myself as a writer. I was obsessed with the show Gilmore Girls and wrote fan fiction on fanfiction.net. I learned so much about how to end scenes, how to wait until I had done my best before I clicked publish. I even learned how to deal with someone who accused me of stealing her idea. (Really. On a fan fiction site.) This was all excellent training!

I discovered the value of shutting my door.

I used to share every chapter I wrote with my friends, until a friend deeply hurt my feelings with a thoughtless comment. Her criticism hurt, and I didn’t know to deal with that, so I responded by keeping my writing to myself for several years.

You know what happened? My writing voice flourished. Because I knew nobody was going to see what I wrote, and because I was writing primarily for myself, I could write far more freely than I had before. It’s important for young writers to learn when to keep their writing door closed and when to open it up.

I put myself out there and learned from the (many) mistakes that I made.

Eventually, I opened up my door again and started sharing my story with a few trusted people in my life. I started sending out queries to agents. I went to conferences and developed writing friendships. I made countless mistakes in this process. Sometimes people pointed out my errors nicely. Sometimes they pointed them out not-nicely. If you take the time to learn from the mistakes you make, then they’re not a waste!

What’s something you’ve done as a writer that has served you well?

Stephanie Morrill writes books about girls who are on an adventure to discover their unique place in the world. She is the author of several contemporary young adult series, as well as two historical young adult novels, The Lost Girl of Astor Street and Within These Lines. Within These Lines was a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard selection, as well as a YALSA 2020 Best Fiction for Young Adults pick. Since 2010, Stephanie has been encouraging the next generation of writers at her website, GoTeenWriters.com, which has been on the Writer’s Digest Best Websites for Writers list since 2017. She lives in the Kansas City area, where she loves plotting big and small adventures to enjoy with her husband and three children. You can connect with Stephanie and learn more about her books at StephanieMorrill.com, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.