A recent post where I opened up about the feelings that came out of a seemingly innocuous conversation with Katie on a rainy day trip for school photographs really seemed to strike a chord with the community of friends on Facebook with whom I shared the link to the story.
The prevailing view seemed to be on the scale of being moved to tears themselves to actually thinking I’m a writer.
The irony was that for many years, I would have actively resisted being described as a writer much less admitting to having any discernible talent at that activity!
When I was in school, I actually detested writing with a such a passion and English classes in particular were my bête noir. So much of the early English courses were focused on identifying bits and pieces of grammar and the less said about diagramming sentences the better. They managed to take a language I was learning and make it the most boring and tedious activity imaginable.
Now, *READING* was another story (pun intended!). I have always been a voracious reader and often many grade levels ahead of where my peers in class would be. I love reading so much because it was the perfect activity for someone who tended to be very introverted and shy and getting lost in a the story of a new universe in the peace of my room was about as close to nirvana as I would dare to dream.
To be sure, reading well above grade level did tend to cause occasional problems. I distinctly remember doing a book report on Frank Herbert’s “Dune” whilst in the fourth grade at Ft Sam Houston Elementary school. And I distinctly remember the teacher trying to call me out and tell me I hadn’t read the book. When I insisted I had, she wanted me to prove it by giving an oral defence of the book report starting with an overview right then and there (as an aside…I hated doing oral presentations in front of the class even more than diagramming sentences!).
By the time my take that the story was about a feudal society set 10,000 years in the future with great powers fighting political and economic battles over the most valuable substance in the universe found on only one planet was out of my mouth, I didn’t have any further questions about my preferred reading for her class. 🙂
Once I was past irritating elementary school teachers by reading books *THEY* had a hard time understanding, the English classes started gravitating toward writing term papers. I didn’t mind writing term papers per se but often the teachers would find the most irritating and tedious process by which they’d insist we’d write the bloody thing. The absolute worst was the teacher who insisted that every note, footnote, or bibliographic reference had to be written on 4×6 index cards which had to be shown to her on demand and heaven help you if you worked faster than her preferred pacing.
I had no problem with her idea of organising ideas so that you could use the cards to come up with the various drafts and annotations. The problem was that I was far more comfortable with having the sources at hand and composing the final draft at the keyboard which made the intermediate steps completely unnecessary.
Fortunately for me, she was the first teacher I encountered who was enamoured of those sodding index cards. Even better was that none of her successors ever figured out that the note and bibliographic index cards and even “first drafts” for subsequent papers were reverse-engineered out of the one (and often only!) final draft that was composed at the keyboard in one sitting. 🙂
When I finally made it to high school and university, now the English classes are starting to focus on literature. Again, totally loved reading it but totally hated the process of dissecting the assigned readings to the n-th degree to come up with the interpretations that the teacher wanted. And Lord help you if your take didn’t jive with the teacher’s, especially the one who was thoroughly in love with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter” who didn’t exactly appreciate my opinion that Hester Prynne was a manipulative bitch beyond imagination and certainly didn’t like it when I proved my hypothesis to the class to their satisfaction.
But the even worse part was having to do “creative writing” in various styles and forms.
Oh. My. Lord.
If I’m really honest here, this about killed me. It wasn’t that I didn’t feel creative (I did…honest!) but the problem often came in translating what was in my head to prose that would actually be interesting for the reader to read. And the less said about my feeble attempts at poetry and my absolute loathing of iambic pentameter, the better. I give mad props to Miss Amanda Gordon (the young poet at President Biden’s inauguration whose poetry and reading almost upstaged the oath of office itself!)…she certainly has some wicked amazing talents at poetry which is something I’m not at all shamed to admit I do not share.
But this was the point that I finally turned the corner from hating writing with a passion to accepting that it was something I could do reasonably competently even if I found the actual mechanics of writing to be somewhat tedious and irritating.
If you’ve managed to survive reading this far, I would suggest that by this point you can probably imagine me standing right in front of you giving you this spiel complete with many hand motions and gestures as well as the cadence and inflection of my voice. That bit of showmanship and wondering where in the hell I’m going with this is probably the only thing that kept you going this far, if we’re truly honest about it. We’re almost home…I promise! 🙂
When it came to creative writing, I felt I sucked at pretty much every literary device imaginable. More than a few times, my teachers and professors tended to agree.
However, the one literary device in my armoury that is my saving grace is the concept of “voice” and that’s what’s kept you along for this ride. I found that the one thing I actually loved about writing was telling a story and writing exactly as I would tell it to my friends. And more than a few teachers (a couple of whom were aspiring novelists) were of the opinion that I was better at it than they were. It’s amazing how they could both admire that one talent and despise me for being good at it because I wasn’t a “professional writer”.
In the years since, I have found that writing is much more comfortable and enjoyable than it was when I was in school or at university. Part of that stems from the fact that I write what I want generally when I want to to and how I want it to be and part of it comes from this feeling that I’ve always loved telling and sharing stories with friends much like the cherished bards of olden times.
This revelation came after reading J Michael Straczynski’s “Complete Book of Scriptwriting”. JMS is a legendary writer in Hollywood most famous for one of my favourite shows of all time (“Babylon 5”) as well as “Murder, She Wrote” and “The Real Ghostbusters”.
Whilst the book (soon to be revised) covers a lot of the mechanics of professional writing for various forms (TVs, movies, novels, comic books…you name it, he’s done it!), the one theme that comes through loud and clear is that real writers that people want to read consistently have an artistic vision for their writing and a passion for the story that won’t allow anyone or anything stand in the way of telling the story they want to tell how they want to tell it and the tenacity (or sheer stubbornness!) to let nothing get in the way of the art.
That was the moment I came to love writing. It may well not be my profession but for these blog entries I share from time to time, sharing the stories as best as I can is certainly my passion! 🙂
And truth be told, it’s a hell of a lot cheaper than therapy and a lot less harrowing than worrying about what the other occupant of the confessional booth might be thinking! 😉