Here I write

I started cleaning up my paperwork, going through old files, digging through boxes and drawers, and I found words at every turn. I have steno pads, note pads, composition books, spiral bound notebooks, 3-ring binders. Any available piece of lined paper - I wrote on it – and, apparently, kept it!

I started writing short stories in the black and white composition books I would get for elementary school. I was always asking for new ones. Often, they would start out as my Math homework or my Science Lab book, and I would have to get a new one and spend half the night transferring the information because I had inevitably written a short story in the middle of a baking soda experiment.

I flunked History in 9th grade, but I went to Creative Writing camp that summer anyway. I visited a cousin who lived in the Midwest and she typed up all my poems. I continued to write. I started keeping a diary. I was recording things I was doing, things I wanted to do, and people I’d meet. I would then make up stories using the personalities of the people I interacted with.

I started writing stories using my friends as fodder. I wrote two novels. It was a mistake to have them read it. I would never do this, one said. I would never say something like this, they said. Now I understood the fiction disclaimer at the beginning of books: All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Sure, it was them at the beginning, but we hadn’t lived as much life as I was writing about and liberties had to be taken!

My mother died suddenly right after I turned 21. I was devastated. Eighteen months I spent being a zombie. I wasn’t writing much, just journaling mostly, because it was all so painful. I started crying all the time – even when I wasn’t sad. I would wake up in tears. I would be in the middle of a TV production class, and tears would roll down my cheeks. I could be in the middle of telling a funny story..well, you get the picture. 

During one of these uncontrollable episodes, I wandered into the campus therapist’s office. He asked, ‘What do you miss the most?’ I told him that I missed talking to her. He said, ‘Then why don’t you write to her?’ Well, DUH. What a concept! Not to write ABOUT her, but to write TO her. So I did. After writing to her for weeks, I had a breakthrough. In the end, it became the very thing that saved my life. I started writing again in more than my journal. I wrote short stories and poems again. I even wrote a full length play!

Here I will share more of what I wrote and more of how I wrote. Here is a perfect time and a perfect place to share who I am, where I’ve been, and where I’m going. So here I am. Write now.