Daily Inspiration: Meet Nancy Christie

Today we’d like to introduce you to Nancy Christie.

Hi Nancy, so excited to have you on the platform. So, before we get into questions about your work life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today. 
I’ve been a writer my whole life—well, technically, since second grade. (My late mother had saved the first book I wrote, and I found it after she died.) I spent a lot of my time as a child playing “Let’s pretend”—making up stories loosely inspired by whatever books I happened to be reading at the time. 

From there, it was just an inevitable slide into writing down stories I made up. But while I continued to do that all through school, while raising my kids, and working, it never occurred to me to submit these stories anywhere. For me, it was enough to have typed them out (yes, this was pre-computer), and then slot them into a file folder, and move on to the next story. 

I finally started submitting them in 1991, and my first short story was accepted in 1994 when I was 40. (I was a bit of a late bloomer.) My first book, The Gifts of Change, was published 10 years later (2004) when I was 50, and my first short fiction collection, Traveling Left of Center and Other Stories was published 10 years after that (2014) at age 60. 

Now, at 69, I have had six books published to date, including my latest: my debut novel, Reinventing Rita, the first in my Midlife Moxie Novel Series. 

We all face challenges, but looking back, would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Writing itself has never been a problem for me. I write the way I breathe—I have to do it. 

The challenges surrounding the act of writing, though, have been many. Finding time to write, especially when my children were young and I was working two jobs. 

Dealing with self-doubt, once I started submitting the pieces and they would come back. (I didn’t know at the time that this was common. I just assumed that the rejections reflected a lack of something on my part.) 

Feelings of guilt because fiction writing, especially short stories, generally isn’t a viable form of income. Every time I spent an hour or so writing instead of working on an article for a client or magazine (I was and still am a full-time freelance writer), I was conscious that if time was money, I was spending mine in a not very profitable way. 

And then, as my work started to get published, the fear of what people would think about me since most of my short stories are, well, a little different. A little odd. A little… well, just not conventional. Would they assume that what my characters experienced came out of my own history? (Generally, no, although…) 

But there was never a good enough reason or motivating factor for me to stop writing, so I didn’t. I couldn’t, anyway. It’s all I ever wanted to do. 

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I have two identities under the “writer” umbrella. I am a freelance writer and have been at it full-time since the mid-1990s. What I love about it is that it gives me the opportunity to talk with people about what they do, to learn all sorts of things that I never would have known, and to be able to work out of my home and never have to go into an office on a daily basis! 

My second, and to me, more important identity is that of a fiction writer. While I have written essays—my book, The Gifts of Change, is essentially a collection of essays—my natural inclination is to make things up. And in some cases, I don’t even have to do that because the characters show up unexpectedly and just start talking to me, and I have to hurry up and get it all down. 

I am proud of all my stories—those that have been published in magazines, those that are part of my published collections, the story that became my first novel, Reinventing Rita, and even the stories that are still sitting in a file or on my hard drive, waiting for me to do something with them. 

But I’m especially proud that I never gave up and that I don’t (or try not to) let money or awards be the arbiter of whether or not I am a success. 

Any day that I write something that feels right to me is a good day, and to me, that’s success. Any day that I don’t let a rejection stop me from writing is, to me, a successful day. 

As for what sets me apart from others, I’d rather think that my commitment to my craft has made me part of a select group of writers who really care about their work and what they write. 

Writing can be a lonely profession. But when I read an interview with another writer or meet one and talk shop, it’s a little less lonely. 

Any advice for finding a mentor or networking in general?
It can be hard to find other writers to meet with. Prior to Covid, there were a lot of writing conferences, and those were wonderful opportunities to meet others who were engaged in the profession at any level. If you were lucky, those relationships were maintained even after you all went your separate ways. 

I went to quite a few back in the day, and now am looking forward to getting back into attending them. 

I also belong to a writing group which has been great. We share what we’re working on, and because we are all doing something different—fiction, nonfiction, poetry, essays—it makes for a very interesting meeting! 

My advice is to get out of your bubble and try to meet other writers. Go to the library, your local bookstore, anywhere you can think of where writers congregate. Take a class in writing. Don’t be afraid to share your work and get feedback. 

The goal is to improve, and that only happens if you learn what needs to be worked on, polished, edited, and revised. 

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.nancychristie.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nancychristie_author/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NancyChristieAuthor/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/NChristie_OH
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuM_5IzM58yJBK7INYjROqw
• Other: https://www.youtube.com/@midlifemoxienovelseries3804