(The following passage is excerpted from a twentieth-<br>century novelists account of her development as a writer)<br>I spent my teens and much of my twenties collecting<br>printed rejections. Early on, my mother lost $61.20—a<br>reading fee charged by a so-called agent to look at one of<br>my unpublished stories. No one had told us that agents<br>‘weren't supposed to get any money up front, weren't<br>supposed to be paid until they sold your work. Then they<br>were to take ten percent of whatever the work earned.<br>Ignorance is expensive. That $61.20 was more money<br>back then than my mother paid for a month's rent<br><br>I badgered friends and acquaintances into reading my<br>work, and they seemed to like it. Teachers read it and said<br>Kindly, unhelpful things. But there were no creative writing<br>classes at my high school, and no useful criticism. At<br>college (in California at that time, junior college was<br>almost free), 1 100k classes taught by an elderly woman<br>‘who wrote children's stories. She was polite about the<br>science fiction and fantasy that | kept handing in, but she<br>finally asked in exasperation, “Can't you write anything<br>normal?”<br><br>A schoolwide contest was held. All submissions had to be<br>made anonymously. My short story won first prize. | was<br>an eighteen-year-old freshman, and I won in spite of<br>competition from older, more experienced people.<br>Beautiful. The $15.00 prize was the first money my writing<br>eared me<br>