Long ago I wanted to be a writer. Back when I was eight years old and I filled spiral notebooks with stories and drawings about a little girl who ran away from home to live on an island, but could visit and look in on the people she loved at any time through a secret window in a cave there. Her island friends were horses because I was going through a horse phase at that point, having recently read the Black Stallion books. I wasn’t so much into Black Beauty, but the Stallion I loved.
I put that dream on a shelf along with all of my books for a very long time, until recently actually. I’d occasionally take it off the shelf long enough to read the jacket cover, to talk about it with vague familiarity, or even to write a page or a couple of something. But back it would go, no longer a priority or a hope, real life being the place where one pursues practical things. But my life it never took those ordinary turns, those “real life” turns. Here I am, 38 without the house, the kids, the marriage. Contemplating starting over.
And in January I went to a writing workshop where I learned all about craft and structure – and how little of it my first attempt at writing something had. I met inspiring people, drank foul hotel coffee, breathed in the sea air, and guffawed with knowledgeable folk. I stared at manuscripts contemplating point of view and the use of adverbs and what made a story advance and what did not. I heard dizzying terms thrown about – scene, drama, description, showing, telling, etc – and struggled to retain the nuances among them.
I may not have been completely qualified for this experience, having no real writing background other than my 8 year old literary scrawlings, a high school rhyming poem about winter romance, and my recent attempt to describe the actions of a depressed character and the interconnectedness of some seemingly random characters at a university and in a coffeeshop as they come together for a thanksgiving meal. I had no formal study. I’d followed everything but my dreams.
And now as I contemplate my next moves in life, I am sure to lose my current misery inducing job in June, I wonder what do I pursue? How do I weave writing into that life? Do I try? Is it worth it?
It is hard to know at this point if writing is something i love or simply something I once loved since at this point it is an awkward endeavor, done with a toolbox the clangs and rattles with emptiness, save one or two ill-suited tools for the process.
But life is stranger than fiction and there are stories all around me. The other day, someone was swallowed by a sinkhole in Florida. I thought to myself how tragic. But I also created an underground world in my head where things and people swallowed and forgotten live. I think I wanted there to be hope for him. Life is stranger than fiction I suppose except when it’s fantasy or science fiction.
Three or so weeks ago I was bitten by a dog. Badly. My leg swells and tingles and I obsessively read about rabies, sure that every potential fever, anxious mood, and pin prick feeling in my ankle is a sign of the disease and that it is too late for me. There is a story there to be sure. No, I didn’t have a rabies shot – the ER did not give me one – so although I’m paranoid – I’m not THAT paranoid. But more likely I end up with scars shaped like tooth marks on my calf. Like a vampire bit me there for a drink. And there’s another story. Waiting to happen. And vampires are even trendy….
Stories are everywhere, but the confidence to write them, to own them and create from them, that is another story altogether.
Filed under: Self discovery, Writing Tagged: changing careers, childhood, depression, dog bite, fear, fiction, growing up, plot, point of view, scene, writing
