Rachel Alarcio – How I Became A Writer

I’ve always been an avid reader. Each time that, as a little kid, my mom took me to the library, I came back with an armful of books on topics ranging from aliens to arts and crafts to magic. I was the kid who breezed through weekly reading logs and earned a plethora of stickers and stamps for each book I read. Throughout elementary school, the Scholastic Book Fair was my personal most highly-anticipated event of the school year. It was book-nerd heaven. As I progressed from picture books to chapter books, I remember thinking, “Hey someone actually writes these books. How cool would it be to be that person?” It was that revelation that led me to answer the age-old question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” with, “I want to be a writer.”

I credit my third grade teacher, Mrs. Beatty, for being the first adult outside of my family to nurture my interest in creative writing. One day in class she was telling the story of a male ballerina who aspired to get accepted into a ballet company. Unfortunately, thanks to guys being underrepresented in the industry, he received rejection after rejection. That was, until he caught his first big break and was admitted to a ballet academy. Inspired by this story of perseverance, I asked my teacher, “Do you have to go to a special school to become a writer?” There were a few snickers coming from my classmates. I ignored them.

She laughed and said, “No, honey. You don’t have to go to a special school to become a writer.” Then she asked me to come see her at her desk. She rummaged around for a minute, pulling and slamming desk drawers, shuffling around papers before she paused. From her drawers, she produced two journals, one hardcover-bound purple journal with lines in it and one smaller hardcover-bound journal without lines in it. I chose the latter. “Write whatever comes to your mind and come back to me in a few weeks and show me what you accomplished,” Mrs. Beatty said. So I did, and that’s what kicked off a nearly decade long love affair with creative writing.

At first, what I wrote was derivative work, fanfiction of my favorite Qubo television shows, like Jane and the Dragon and Class of the Titans. Slowly, I began to write my own original fiction and entered some contests. In middle school, I won a best-in-grade award for my non-fiction in my school’s National Women’s History Month Essay Contest. Then, in freshman year of high school, I joined WriteGirl, a creative writing mentorship organization for empowering teen girls in the Los Angeles area. Over the nearly three years I’d been attending workshops and learning from my high school English teachers, I’d expanded my writer’s toolbox, practiced my public speaking, and completed many short stories. I had the unparalleled opportunity to open for world-touring slam poet Caroline Rothstein as a sophomore in high school. Eventually, during my senior year, I earned a national Silver Medal in Short Story from the prestigious Scholastic Arts and Writing Awards for my piece called, “Parking Lot Supernova.”

The summer after graduation, I worked on set with nineteen other female aspiring filmmakers on the AT&T Hello Sunshine Filmmaker Lab produced by Fresh Films to interview influential women in the industry. Seeing so many inspiring female success stories inspired me to push harder to establish a space for myself in the film ecosystem. The summer of 2020, between my freshman and sophomore year in college, I attended a special TV writing intensive where I learned what it would be like in the writer’s room for a television show, which further sparked my interest in writing for TV and film.

These days, as I work towards my B.A. in English with a concentration in Film and Media Studies from Kalamazoo College in Michigan, I do copywriting and am active in the literary/publishing scene. I am a volunteer submissions reader at The Incandescent Review and have recently accepted a fall internship with Exposition Review. My work has also been featured in two award-winning WriteGirl anthologies, Exposition Review, and You Might Need to Hear This, as well as displayed for millions of people in transit at Los Angeles International Airport’s Terminal 7-8. Contact me for copywriting or screenwriting gigs @raechillout on Instagram connect with me at Rachel Alarcio on LinkedIn, and follow @rachelalarcio on Twitter.