Why I Write
So apparently it is the National Day on Writing, and the theme is "Why I Write."
Way back in 2004, I said the following:
I grew up listening to my mother tell me stories she made up on the spur of the moment to while away time in the car or when I was sick. I would help her tell the stories sometimes, and by the time I was five, I was writing my own stories and illustrating them.
When I went into a school for gifted kids at age eight, there was a creative writing class that we all had to take. We wrote and illustrated books on white printer paper and the teacher bound our books up for us, and voila! We had a real, live book.
In my years at that school, I wrote and illustrated over 30 books. I still have all of them but one -- the one I co-authored with a friend, and she ended up with custody.
The neatest feature of this was that once every couple of months we took our books over to the little kindergarten-1st grade kids and had story time. We read our own books out loud, showed them the pictures, everything. I loved this more than anything. Not being the center of attention, I was very shy, but I loved sharing what I'd written.
It was months before I realized that the other kids didn't like to do it, and it took one of the teachers pointing it out to me to make me realize that the kids loved my books the best. I assume it was because I wrote about cool stuff and had the best pictures, and my books were usually funny. I could also read upside-down, a necessary skill when reading to a classroom full of little kids, so I didn't stutter and stumble through reading my material. I got drafted occasionally to read other peoples' books.
And the feeling of acceptance, of utter happiness, that this gave me, is probably why I persist in doing what I do today.
It was only my fifth LJ entry ever. I swear I've written another entry about it sometime before 2008, but I can't find it and don't have time to go poking around to look.
But that's pretty much it. It wasn't, for me, something I sat down and decided I wanted to do. I always just did it. I've always told stories. Before I could write, I dictated them to my mother, who wrote them down or typed them out on our old Smith-Corona typewriter. It never stopped. I made up stories all the time. I didn't write all of them down. I couldn't have. It was constant.
If you count roleplaying and just hanging out with your characters as storytelling, I still do it pretty much constantly. The actual writing, that's harder, that's plot and action and climax, and it's not easy or something that comes second-nature to me, but it's immensely pleasurable when it's working.
The worst thing about being bipolar, the absolute worst thing, is that either the bipolar itself or the medication seriously interferes with my ability to write. Not stuff like this, journal entries and the like, but fiction, stuff where I have to make things up and make a hundred decisions in a minute. The real stuff, the stuff that makes me feel whole.
There was a time when it was effortless, when I could write between a thousand and five thousand words a day and barely feel it. Now I'm lucky if I can squeeze a thousand out a couple of times a week. It's miserable, like having the thing you love most, the thing that defines you, taken away and dangled just out of reach. Almost there. Almost there. It's sad.
I don't want to end there, on a down note. I want to say something grand and uplifting, something about writing and reading and books, and how these things save people by giving them lives outside of their own lives. I can't think of anything. All I can think of is days spent laying on the warm sidewalk during creative writing class, which we often held outside, concocting wild ideas and laughing with the other kids. If there's a heaven, part of it is exactly that: writing out my stories in pencil on notebook paper, making notes on illustrations I wanted to include, crossing things out and rewriting them, and doing this sheet after sheet after sheet, effortless, over and over, forever, amen. Only in heaven, I will be surrounded by my cats.
The other part of heaven involves things like Ben Barnes and Molly Quinn and Jessica Biel and James Purefoy and Jason Isaacs and probably Tom Jane, too, and riding boots, and ponytails, and stables, and libraries with lots and lots of books, and lots and lots of stern discipline and loving correction and sweet submission and lots and lots of hard, hard fucking. But this is "Why I Write Day," not "Why I Write Porn Day."
Although maybe we need one of those, too.
X-posted from Dreamwidth. Comment count:
Way back in 2004, I said the following:
I grew up listening to my mother tell me stories she made up on the spur of the moment to while away time in the car or when I was sick. I would help her tell the stories sometimes, and by the time I was five, I was writing my own stories and illustrating them.
When I went into a school for gifted kids at age eight, there was a creative writing class that we all had to take. We wrote and illustrated books on white printer paper and the teacher bound our books up for us, and voila! We had a real, live book.
In my years at that school, I wrote and illustrated over 30 books. I still have all of them but one -- the one I co-authored with a friend, and she ended up with custody.
The neatest feature of this was that once every couple of months we took our books over to the little kindergarten-1st grade kids and had story time. We read our own books out loud, showed them the pictures, everything. I loved this more than anything. Not being the center of attention, I was very shy, but I loved sharing what I'd written.
It was months before I realized that the other kids didn't like to do it, and it took one of the teachers pointing it out to me to make me realize that the kids loved my books the best. I assume it was because I wrote about cool stuff and had the best pictures, and my books were usually funny. I could also read upside-down, a necessary skill when reading to a classroom full of little kids, so I didn't stutter and stumble through reading my material. I got drafted occasionally to read other peoples' books.
And the feeling of acceptance, of utter happiness, that this gave me, is probably why I persist in doing what I do today.
It was only my fifth LJ entry ever. I swear I've written another entry about it sometime before 2008, but I can't find it and don't have time to go poking around to look.
But that's pretty much it. It wasn't, for me, something I sat down and decided I wanted to do. I always just did it. I've always told stories. Before I could write, I dictated them to my mother, who wrote them down or typed them out on our old Smith-Corona typewriter. It never stopped. I made up stories all the time. I didn't write all of them down. I couldn't have. It was constant.
If you count roleplaying and just hanging out with your characters as storytelling, I still do it pretty much constantly. The actual writing, that's harder, that's plot and action and climax, and it's not easy or something that comes second-nature to me, but it's immensely pleasurable when it's working.
The worst thing about being bipolar, the absolute worst thing, is that either the bipolar itself or the medication seriously interferes with my ability to write. Not stuff like this, journal entries and the like, but fiction, stuff where I have to make things up and make a hundred decisions in a minute. The real stuff, the stuff that makes me feel whole.
There was a time when it was effortless, when I could write between a thousand and five thousand words a day and barely feel it. Now I'm lucky if I can squeeze a thousand out a couple of times a week. It's miserable, like having the thing you love most, the thing that defines you, taken away and dangled just out of reach. Almost there. Almost there. It's sad.
I don't want to end there, on a down note. I want to say something grand and uplifting, something about writing and reading and books, and how these things save people by giving them lives outside of their own lives. I can't think of anything. All I can think of is days spent laying on the warm sidewalk during creative writing class, which we often held outside, concocting wild ideas and laughing with the other kids. If there's a heaven, part of it is exactly that: writing out my stories in pencil on notebook paper, making notes on illustrations I wanted to include, crossing things out and rewriting them, and doing this sheet after sheet after sheet, effortless, over and over, forever, amen. Only in heaven, I will be surrounded by my cats.
The other part of heaven involves things like Ben Barnes and Molly Quinn and Jessica Biel and James Purefoy and Jason Isaacs and probably Tom Jane, too, and riding boots, and ponytails, and stables, and libraries with lots and lots of books, and lots and lots of stern discipline and loving correction and sweet submission and lots and lots of hard, hard fucking. But this is "Why I Write Day," not "Why I Write Porn Day."
Although maybe we need one of those, too.
X-posted from Dreamwidth. Comment count: