When I wrote for a scam

I have a little section in my bookcase reserved for books and magazines containing my work. It’s pretty thin at the moment, and contains more pages of other people’s writing than it does of mine. Over the past couple of years, I’ve been excited to watch the spot slowly grow. There’s something slightly surreal seeing the words I have laboured over in private making their way into print. Most of my writing I am quite pride of, but I must admit, one of the books in my collection makes me cringe. You see, I was so anxious to see my work professionally published, it turns out that the first book in my collection was actually a bit of a scam.

I had written what was quite a moving poem based on the movie the Shopgirl. Shopgirl is a rather odd, melancholic movie that tells the story of a young woman named Mirabelle and her flawed attempts of finding love. When I watched the movie, I was single and in my late twenties, and something about Mirabelle’s loneliness and journey towards self-expression, resonated with me. So after I finished watching the movie I sat down to write.

Weeks later, after hours of editing and rewriting, the result was a poem that I decided was quite profound. In fact I was so proud of my poem I posted it on a poetry website in the hope of winning a prize. I didn’t win anything, but I did get an invitation to have my poem published in a limited-edition anthology - I just had to pay a small fee for the privilege. At that point, my vanity got the best of me. I ignored the nagging voice in my head that suggested it was just a marketing ploy to make money, and chose to believe the website actually liked my poem so much they wanted to publish it. In the end, I paid for my poem to be published, for my copy of the anthology, and even for a blurb about myself to be included next to the poem. The costs all added up and in the end publishing my poem wasn’t cheap.

When I eventually flicked through the pages of my expensive anthology, I realised what I had known all along, but didn’t want to admit: the whole thing was essentially a scam. Perhaps if I had believed in my writing abilities and in the quality of the words I had written, I would have found a more reputable competition to enter. Or maybe I could have submitted the poem to literary magazines in an attempt to have it published. But I didn’t. All those options would have taken time and effort and I was in too much of a hurry to see my work published. So I took the easier way and while it resulted in my poem being printed in a book, it also devalued it. Imagine the sense of achievement I would have had if an editor deemed it worthy of their magazine and was prepared to paid to publish it! Instead there was just the shallow flattery of seeing my words in black and white. It turns out, sometimes its worth taking the difficult road. Short cuts might get me to my destination more quickly, but they also bypass all the beautiful scenery.