Elizabeth Standish

I’ve been telling stories as long as I can remember. Mostly I was talking to myself, narrating my day as a pre-teen, as if I was telling a story about some other person. No surprise considering I was one of those lucky kids whose parents read to me every night—seriously, every night—until I was old enough to read myself to sleep. Even in my 40s, I still can’t fall asleep without reading.

From then until now, there’s been a constant stream of words flowing from my pen. Poetry (what teenager living through the 90s didn’t write some?), school essays (I always turned in the longest one), and journals (So. Many. Journals.). All that practice came in handy when I got to law school and used the skills we were being taught about facts and arguing, plus the writing I’d been doing since um, always, to keep my grades up by taking classes where the final was a paper.

Just after law school, I took a creative writing class and wrote the world’s shittiest first draft of what would become Magnificent Mess. It was really a place for me to bitch about how awful grad school was. When I finished the manuscript, I stuck it on the shelf for years and occasionally I would feel the judgment from Emma and Patrick and Alex for doing a half-ass job of telling their story. I ignored them in favor of doing a long slog through the beginning of my legal career, including a five-year stint practicing criminal defense as an appellate attorney.

While criminal law wasn’t where I wanted to spend my life, writing sixty-page briefs helped hone my craft. It made me a better storyteller—because while legal cases are about facts and figures; they are also about arguments. And arguments are ultimately stories.

Finally, eleven years after I wrote the first draft of Magnificent Mess, I decided to do something with it. The road from first draft, through first editor, back on the shelf, and finally down to work to completion was tortuous—for me, but also Emma, Patrick, and Alex.

I’ve had a fair share of wrenches thrown into the works of my life; I truly believe that those experiences (everything from being refused entry to prison to see a client because my shirt was “too tight”, to battling serious health issues) made me who I am. For a large stretch of time, books were, if not my only companion, my most constant one (another book, another time, perhaps?). Living through those years, I didn’t think I was doing research, but the sheer volume of pages read undoubtedly influenced me not only as a reader (where do I love getting lost, and maybe don’t want to be found?) and ultimately as a writer (how can I guide other people to getting lost!)

For now, Magnificent Mess is an ode to myself; a recognition of the trials and tribulations of pushing through law school, battling family expectations, and finding my way on a path so far removed from that of my peers, it sometimes doesn’t look like we’re in the same career.

And yet things have a way of working out. I found a dream job when I was trying NOT to be an attorney anymore, and the freedom to find myself as an individual and a writer.