Allie Larkin is writing her story

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 When Allie Larkin was a theater student at Ithaca College, she was drawn to the characters in the plays but shied from the limelight on stage.

  "Some people were so passionate about it, but I didn’t feel it," she recalls.

  That feeling would come later. The 34-year-old author of "Stay: A Novel" (Dutton, 2010) says she has found passion and purpose as a full-time creative writer.

  "I didn’t love it enough," she says of her theater studies. "With writing, I do; I’ll put myself out there and be rejected and it’s OK.

  "It’s the only thing I want to do. It’s nice to be passionate about something; I knew it when I got there."

  Larkin grew up in Somers, a town in northern Westchester County. She was an only child and says she was obsessed with reading and writers.

  While at Ithaca, Larkin was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder. It explained difficulties she had had in high school classes, where she found it hard to focus, and the aimlessness she had felt after graduating: She had spent three years after high school working in a variety of jobs.

  "I was so lost at that point; I went into theater because I didn’t think I was good at anything else."

  But the late arrival of her ADD diagnosis frustrated her.

  "It was hard that I spent that much time thinking about it," she says.

  Uninspired by theater, Larkin left Ithaca and enrolled in St. John Fisher College, intent on preparing for a lucrative career in business. She says she was set on not recognizing her creative side. She had enjoyed reading and dreaming up stories as a child, and her mind was always spinning with ideas, characters and plots. But she didn’t like writing down her stories; her handwriting was messy, and she equated story writing with penmanship-something her teachers had always criticized.

  A writing class at Fisher reignited her interest. "Stay" was born out of an exercise in that class and took its first form as a short story.

  "It was the worst thing I’ve ever written," she says, laughing.

  She kept working on it-adding, deleting, moving things around-and even though "it was still terrible," there was something about the story’s main character, Van, that Larkin liked.

  She submitted the story to literary journals and found a pearl in the rejection slips. One reviewer had taken the time to scribble on the rejection notice, "There’s something good here. Keep trying."

  And so she did. Larkin expanded the story, gaining feedback in a group that she and fellow writers formed around 2002, the year she graduated from Fisher.

  After graduation she tried her hand at freelance business writing, but her heart wasn’t in it. She landed a good job at a mortgage company doing back-end processing. It was demanding work, and she was soon promoted. As a career path unfolded before her, the stirrings of unease resurfaced.

  "I wasn’t in the right element for me," she says. "I am a workhorse … but I couldn’t keep going."

  Her writing had begun to suffer from her long days at work and tired evenings. Larkin decided to quit her job and tackle writing full time; she credits her husband, Jeremy, for supporting the decision. While it seems like an obvious choice now, it felt like a gamble, she says: It wasn’t enough to know she enjoyed writing enough to do it full time. She had to work up the courage to let it happen.

  "It was something I was doing on the side of the rest of my life," she says. "I think sometimes we have ideas of who we want to be, and that’s not really who we are."

  As she continued working on the book, she hunted for an agent who would represent her to publishers. Eventually she received an offer of representation and submitted her manuscript. A few days after her agent showed it to Dutton, the publisher offered to buy it.

  "Stay" was published last June; a paperback version comes out this year. That’s Larkin’s dog Argo on the cover.

  Larkin, who speaks to writing groups and students, has this advice for aspiring writers: "You have to write badly before you can write well. It’s hard to trust it’s going to get good at some point. It’s a very long and very slow process."

  She holds up her own experience as evidence.

  "It’s not a shock that this is what I do, but it took me a really long time to see it," she says. "I think I’ve found my place in the world."

3/4/11 (c) 2011 Rochester Business Journal. To obtain permission to reprint this article, call 585-546-8303 or e-mail [email protected].