How it all began..

My mother is a storyteller. Family stories, fiction. Stories about herself, about her kids. Stories she read in a book. My Dad, more of a thinker than a storyteller, still told us stories every night — epic multi-night adventures, in which we were the main characters. As we got older, we told round robin in the car or on camping trips and laughed ourselves silly.

To me, everything is a story. History? Forget the dates and ‘facts,’ the real history is what happened and why. My day yesterday? It’s a story, possibly boring, but mine. Tomorrow? A story I tell myself. Maybe it will come true.

Putting it down…

I like to think I had a good education. In any case, I had teachers who taught us to write by writing stories. There was a little box of story-starter cards on an empty desk. For about 40 minutes once or twice a week we were to pick a card and write a story. I loved it. From wring stories at school, I began writing stories at home. I wrote my first poem when I was six or seven years old. It rhymed. I was so proud of that poem, I still have it memorized.

What not to do…

In Middle School, I began an epic tale. This was going to be a book — or at least a really long short story. I started out pretty standard: a dragon was devastating the country, but all who tried to kill it failed. A girl got angry and marched up to the dragon’s lair. She found the dragon rather conveniently dead, it having been seriously injured in the last battle. That part took, maybe, three pages. Then follows ten hand-written pages about the treasures she found in the dragon’s hoard. Finally, even I, the proud author, realized: this isn’t a story, it’s an inventory. I keep “Dragon-dressed Shepherd’s Daughter” filed away… a reminder to myself of the importance of Story.

Imagination breeds ideas…

Papers, computer files, poems. Notes scribbled on torn scraps of paper. A file box filled with unfinished work. The joy of mulling over these stories. Just like my heroine collected treasure, I collected ideas, scenes, feelings, sources for future stories. And just like she stashed them away for the future, I didn’t do much with my hoard, either. But it kept growing.

Writers write

A friend once told me, ‘Writers write.” I cannot forget it. For a while I wondered: does that mean I’m not really a writer? I never finish anything. Maybe I should give up. But I didn’t want to give up. I guess I’m stubborn that way. After a while I realized there are many types of writing; the kind doesn’t really matter.

Writers write. Whether it be on scraps of paper, the computer, or the margins of old books. Whether they keep their writings nice and tidy or lose everything in a paper pile. Whether they ever do anything with what they have written. In large amounts or small amounts, they write. And so do I. And so, probably, do you.