When I was a kid,
growing up in a small Texas town, I found that when I wrote my “stories” I
would have a large audience on the playground any day after lunch. All I had to
do was to bring my most recent chapter to read. I guess I really liked the
feeling of importance. More than that, I really liked the feeling I got while I
was putting my thoughts on paper. This phenomenon continued through junior high
school and high school. I would write and share; but I never saved anything.
Growing
How I wish I
still had those early stories to read now. What a difference I would see; what
growth I would identify. Those early stories, I remember, were along the lines
of the Nancy Drew mysteries. I think I saw myself as a great mystery writer. By
the time I was in high school, I think I had graduated into some of the
stranger stories similar to what I write now.
After I became an adult I only remember writing a few
more things. I wrote one story based on a recurring nightmare I had as a child.
This, I wrote at the suggestion of a counselor. Through the writing of this
story and a charcoal drawing I did that illustrated it, I was able to write my
way through the pains of my childhood. Later, after the earliest Star Wars
movie and the first Star Trek movie came out I wrote a sci-fi for my kids.
Again I had an audience to listen as each chapter emerged. I found it to be a
way to draw my kids and me closer together.
Life
Got In The Way
After that I put
my writing aside for a very long time. Life got in the way as it always seems
to do. I told myself that I didn’t have time to write. That, however, would
have been the perfect time to write. When your kids are growing up there are
always so many funny things and so many sweet things that they do. Now I have
to rely on a faulty memory to get them down on paper; and there are a few
things that I feel are worth doing just that. I only hope that I can remember
the details well enough to turn them into stories before I can no longer
remember at all.
Now, here I am, retired and needing something to fill my
time. I went the FaceBook virtual farming route for a while. There is just so
much virtual farming a person can do. It’s not like you’re going to take your
virtual veggies and make a virtual salad, so you can invite your virtual
friends to a virtual feast after virtual church. After a while it gets
virtually boring.
Looking
Back
So why do I
write now? Because I’m a virtual nut case? Okay; maybe I’m just a little
obsessive and somewhat creative. Writing is something that I have been storing
up inside of me for a number of years. I stored it so long that the silos of my
heart and my mind were about to burst open and spill all the grain it had
stored up onto a virtual field; I like to think of it as field of Texas
bluebonnets. These silos are splitting at the seams now and the stories are
steadily seeping out. It’s all that I can do to scoop them up and pour them out
onto my laptop.
Why
Do You Write?
Go on, ask
yourself this question. What makes you put things on paper? It might be a hard
question to answer but it is an important one. We should all, at some point,
take a look at ourselves to find out what really motivates us to write in order
to better understand our writing. Is it something that you have always done?
Why? If you were told that you could never write another thing what would you
do? I think that I would have to go on writing anyway, no matter what the
consequences.
No comments:
Post a Comment