THE WRITER WITHIN

Writers may be "born not made", but the environment plays a large part in whether the innate talent is developed into a viable mode. I can't remember a time when I didn't tell stories. It wouldn't surprise me to discover this one created alternate worlds and personalities with-in the womb. I'm easily bored and there wouldn't be much to do except think. Bookworm status came naturally, a mere hop away from being a dreamer.

My first attempt at public story telling met with deep disapproval on all sides. Had half my third grade class convinced that the Holy Ghost is Jesus' grandfather, and worked as a spy in the middle-ages for the Holy Inquisition. I proved to be an iconoclastic influence even then. Mother Superior suggested that "an imagination like (mine) should not go to waste." She told me to put my "interesting improvements on dull reality onto paper as fiction." She also required that I swear on my "sacred honor never again to improve on religious truth, however boring."

During my freshman year in high school dark poetry spewed from a soul thoroughly trounced by puberty's agonies. Nothing good in life could be perceived. My homeroom teacher admired the poetry and suggested several cheerful subjects, "to aim (my) muse at. However, not during Latin class, unless the poetry be in Latin." No way that would happen. Latin held the position of Enemy Number One in my personal universe. Knew for a fact, from the deep, dark depths of my soul, that dead language had a contract on me. I was right.

In my college freshman year I finally took the first in a series of writing courses. My main efforts were aimed at a degree in history with a minor in cultural anthropology, as everyone knows writers don't make a living wage. History professors are a better bet. Maintaining Dean's list status through six semesters, my quest came to a crashing end when my old nemesis, Latin, proved my downfall. In California, Health Science is a required class for any degree. What need is there in being able to spell a twenty-seven letter word for a disease you only get bathing in Egypt's Nile River? Why can't you call an elbow an elbow, rather than (what's-that-word)?

Decades passed raising my four children. My improvements on life's truths turned to telling bedtime stories, and making my husband laugh about life in the Kiddy Zone. Every writer knows disaster and catastrophe are the flip sides to comedy. It's all in your slant. Now wish I'd written them down.

Then came a serious accident no one expected me to survive. The bones healed. I began to walk again. Galloping arthritis set-in, and left me unable to get out without wheelchair assistance. A well-developed twist in my sense of the ridiculous, combined with remembering two nuns who saw in a child a writer, rather than a liar, led to enrolling in the first of three correspondence writing courses. This proved the first step in saving what passes for my sanity.

Five years later (1989) I sold my first story, a mainstream/romance called "The Cliff" to AMERICAN ACCENT SHORT STORY MAGAZINE. Between 1990 and 1994 I maintained a yearly average of 3-4 articles, and 1-5 short stories sold for money with a few others going to copies only markets. In 1994 my creative efforts focused on my first mystery novel. A little over a year later an agent liked my synopsis, but rejected the manuscript as being paced too slowly. In 1995 the second book in the series began while a tightened first novel went back out onto the rounds. I'd cross my fingers, but need them to type.

Meanwhile, my second novel's first ten chapters are virtually first-draft finished. I know where my plot and sub-plots will end up. The middle? Aside from the broad plot lines, your guess is as good as mine. My characters will let me know when we get there.

If my early attempts to spice and improve life had received blows and yelling, rather than calm realignment, my present condition would be considerably less hopeful. Of this, one is certain. A wildly active imagination in the mundane world is like unschooled magical ability in a fantasy world, potentially fatal. With that imagination gentled, not broken, and educated onto well-structured paths, a published writer can be born.


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