Once a writer, always a writer
Why oh why is it that every time I resolve to set the writing aside and really focus on other things, I get seized by a story? Today my brain started turning over possibilities of a middle grade book aimed at Link’s interests and challenges. I’m trying to not let this run away with me. I still have to put other things first. There are household, child care, and business tasks that need more of me for the next while. But the writing piece of my brain is busy stewing away trying to figure out plots and characters.
I’ve had this happen before. Twice during my years of one-baby-after-another I decided to officially give up my dream of being a writer. It seemed silly to hang on to the dream when I hadn’t written a thing for years. Both times I was seized by a writing idea within days of giving up. After the second time I realized that giving up writing just wasn’t going to work. I had to find a different way to banish my sadness over not writing. I chose to try to realize the dreams instead of banish them. It has worked pretty well so far.
The other day I decided to dig into my file box full of old stories. I wanted to see what was in there. I was surprised at how much of it there was. Apparently I’ve been a compulsive writer for longer than I can remember clearly. I found the hand written draft of The Purple Rabbit which was my very first story. I started it one day when I was six years old because my older sister was writing a story and I wanted to be just like her. I’ll never get rid of that draft even though the pages are yellowing and beginning to crumble around the edges. I love the child handwriting.
There were many other stories. Most of them I’d completely forgotten about. I didn’t stop to read many of them. I just flipped through the pages, scanning to remember what the story was and who I’d been when I wrote it. Some of the stories proclaimed their origins very clearly like the prophecy based story I began after reading David Eddings. Or the epic book about a revolutionary war that I planned out after reading Les Miserables. Many of these stories were reflections of the things that captured my imagination at the time. Absorptive reflective juvenilia, to use Bujold’s term.
Every so often as I flipped through, a scene or an entire story jumped off the page at me. I would sit there with that one piece of paper and know for sure that here was something I could work with. Something in that piece of writing was not a reflection, but my very own. These ones I set aside for further consideration because they still live even after spending a decade in a dusty file box. Everything else went back into the box.
I’m not a person who keeps things for sentiment sake. I pitched my yearbooks when I was only a couple of years out of high school. I gave away most of my stuffed animals and toys as I outgrew them. Award certificates get pitched. But I’ll never voluntarily throw away these stories I’ve written. They say more about the person I was at the time than any other object I could keep. I love watching my handwriting change and mature even as the stories themselves change and mature. I look at them and remember so clearly when this particular story lived in my brain and absorbed all my thoughts.
For better or for worse, I am a writer. What I am not is an author. To be a writer only requires that I write. To be an author I have to be published. My goal is to be an author too, but that will take a bit more time.