What Is Your Reason For Wanting To Write?

I have been asked many times why I wanted to write, and my answer to that question was always the same:

"Because I love to!"

Ever since I was a little girl, I have written stories, skits, and plays, and sometimes I just kept them to myself. The joy was in the writing, not the sharing. I watched my brother, John, who was eight years older than myself, doing much these same things, but he was actually writing and illustrating real stories, and he would show his stories to the family and his friends at school, to rave review. I looked up to him and decided that I wanted to become what he was going to become: a writer. Neither of our plans worked out quite the way we had planned.

All the sudden, my life was put on hold. My sister, Carol, then age 16, had to have major back surgery for scoliosis. Back in those days, that kind of surgery was very much cutting-edge and experimental. She would later have to have her back re-broken and corrective surgery would have to be done to fix an error in procedure that they had not anticipated when they initially performed the first surgery. Poor Carol--and I truly mean that! Sande, my twin sister, and I were recruited as her nurses for the duration and we helped Mom while Carol attended school via intercom, as she lie in a special hospital bed, in a full-body cast for almost an entire year. That's when I stopped writing. At age 12, I didn't have the time or the energy to write. Don't get me wrong: we may have been cooped up, helping out, but we loved it!

Our Dad had called a family meeting before the surgery and talked to all of us (John was in the Army by then). He explained that we needed to pull together as a family, and work together, plus he said that he needed us! Those magic words: "he needed us!" We jumped at the chance to show him we could be good helpers--and we were!

I'm ashamed to say that I let that detour take me pretty much off the path of my "dream to write" for over forty years! I kept trying to get back to it, but "life" kept getting in the way. Don't let that happen to you! I have regretted it for years. It's like wasting years of your life, when you could have been about the business of working on your "dream!"

If you are serious about writing, then stick to your guns! Faithfully set aside time every day for your writing; read what you can to help you learn more about your craft; find a quiet place in your home to call your own, where you can write without distraction; and make a commitment to you dream. It won't be easy and it's not going to be all fortune and fame--it's going to be hard work, but it will be worth it!

Until next time...stay safe, stay well, and may God bless you all.

Write, Write, Write!

In order to accomplish your goal of becoming a writer, it's going to take a fair amount of commitment on your part. What that means in practical terms is that you're going to have to try to write something just about every day. You could start with a bite-size goal, such as writing a small description of each of the rooms in your apartment or house until you have completed describing each of the main rooms in your home. You could keep the descriptions in a folder for later use in one of your stories, if you want. Everything that you write in your life is useful at one time or another; it all goes toward making you become a better writer and is never wasted.

Next, you could take one of those rooms you have described and possibly describe something happening in it. Maybe the description will have inspired you, and you may have even thought of a short story or it could even be just a few short paragraphs. The point is that you need to be consistently writing, day after day, for several days in a row, so that you are keeping your commitment to yourself and others to become a writer. Do you see my point? Once the writing becomes a habit, you'll start looking forward to it, and it will actually become such an engrained part of your life, that it will be more difficult for you not to write than it would be to write. You will actually feel weird if you don't write, and that's what we're hoping for, because then, it'll be a full-fledged habit.

I know that the business of "life" tends to get in the way of our day-to-day existence, but we do owe it to ourselves to keep this commitment if we're ever going to become the writers that we want to become. I don't know about you, but I love writing and I need to write down these multiple stories that I have floating around in my head. Furthermore, it's fun writing and if I can actually make a living at it some day, I'll be the happiest girl on the planet.

Until next time...stay safe, stay well, and may God bless you all!