On Writing

I've never considered myself to be an exceptional writer. I've just always loved writing. I assume it stems from a love a reading that I developed as a child. What else could I do? I had few friends and was bullied often enough to, according to my father, come home crying and saying I didn't want to go to school on a regular basis.

And so, I retreated into a world of fantasy: Ella Enchanted, Catherine called Birdy, The Chronicles of Narnia, countless fairy tales, and Little House on the Prarie (whose setting was foreign enough to me to be considered fantasy, ha ha ha!). They made me happy because I could imagine myself beyond the real world that caused me pain so frequently.

It seems like a natural progression to want to give something back to the literary world that gave so much to me. And so, I started writing.

At first, I clumsily mimicked stories I knew and loved:

[N.B. these are exactly transcribed, so please forgive the grammatical errors. I was the queen of run-on-sentences... :P]

Grade 2 [I think]:

(...) La sorciere parle au prince. "Prince, tu as 3 jours a dit 'je t'aime' au monstre. Si tu dis a la troisieme jour, le monstre va changer en princesse." (...)

Grade 6:

(...) The christening was a great one and all the gods and goddesses came to lay their blessings on the infant, but one person was not invited. The sea witch was sore vexed. She got very angry indeed and burst through the palace doors. Everyone was silenced, she started to walk towards the cradle which held the little girl. She chanted a spell in an unknown language. Suddenly, the witch and the baby were gone!

Neptune and his wife searched everywhere and sent messengers all over the ocean but neither the princess nor the witch could be found. All the oceans seemed to fall into a bottomless pit of despair. Neptune and his wife cried every night to the mourn the loss of their only child. (...) [At the end, the witch bursts from anger and is never ever seen again, ha ha ha!]

Also Grade 6:

Once upon a time long ago, Rabbit had a long bushy tail like Fox. Rabbit loved his tail and would spend long hours cleaning and brushing it but sometimes he would brag and the other animals got tired of it so one night the lion called a council meeting and once they were all there, some of them started complaining:

"Rabbit always says his tail is better than mine!" Fox cried,

"Rabbit keep saying his tail is faster than mibne!" whined Turtle,

"Rabbit won't stop bugging me by saying his tail stands out more than mine!" complained Bear, and so it went on.

"Calm yourselfs" said Lion. "We shall think of a small punishment for him" Then it got noisy again

"Let's banish him!" shouted Skunk

"Let's burn him!" whistled Robin

"Duh, let's feed 'im to the owl!" said Buzzard

"No, no, no! A SMALL punishment" repeated Lion.

"I know", brayed Donkey "Let's get Owl to bite off his tail, then he won't brag about it anymore!" (...)

Grade 11: [dramatic monologue for Hamlet unit]

There are so many ways I could kill you. I could sever your hands and feet from your limbs and watch you bleed to death. I could poison your cup with a substance so vile that it would make your body sieze and your heart shudder to a slow and painful stop. The possibilities are infinite (...) What if I nestled a venemous serpent into your sin-stained sheets so that it would strike you as you made incestuous love to my whore-mother? (...)

Once I hit high school, though, I stopped using school as my only outlet to write and started to create my own stories. I still have the beginnings of two or three novels that I started writing. At this age, my stories took on another purpose: to live out my own fantasies. Having grown up reading about girls having great adventures, I wanted my own! The heroines in my "novels" looked and acted surprisingly like me, and the romantic interests looked and acted strangely like whatever guy I had a crush on at the time.

You'd think I'd have grown out of that. But really, all the male characters in the stories I write now (including the novel I'm seriously working on) are based on men I know/knew. So much so, that there are a few projects that I have going that I'm far too embarrassed to show to others because the similarities to my life and fantasies are so blatantly obvious!

But never in my life, would I have imagined that my blog ramblings and novel-in-progress would actually generate interest! Tonight, I was asked by a friend (you know who you are... :P) that she was disappointed that I did my blog post in the morning because she looked forward to reading them before going to sleep. Well, you could have knocked me over with a feather, I was just that flattered and pleased! So of course I wrote another post just for her <3

But I've also received so much positive feedback from others about my novel, and recently, this blog. I just feel so amazingly blessed that my writing, imperfect as it is, gives people pleasure. Finally, I'm starting to give back to the world what has been given to me since I was a lonely insecure little girl.

That's why I write. I don't believe I can call myself a writer until I publish something, but that doesn't stop me from writing my little heart out to amuse, inspire, encourage, or just get things out of my own system.

I just hope that my love affair with the written word doesn't someday turn into an unhappy marriage and divorce, ha ha ha!