A Different Course

I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. When I was little, I used to copy chapter books word for word and pretend that I had written them (before I knew what plagiarism meant). In middle school and high school, my term papers and book reports always carried high marks and my friends would beg me to write their papers too. My Creative Writing teacher even used one of my poems for teaching purposes which he still uses today in class. It started out:

Pegasus flew me

with his mighty wings

to a mythical mansion

where held captive - my king

(Give me a break, I was only 14)

I went to college on a Sullivan scholarship for writing. I earned my diploma in business, but received a minor in English. Again, my essays and reports were well received by my profs.

During the rocky years of my first marriage, I lost interest in a lot of things. I came to believe that I wasn't good at anything, especially writing. Part of it was due to the intense verbal abuse and part of it hinged on my own maturity level. It's easy to say that you don't care what someone thinks about you and your work, but when the people who are supposed to love you most berate you, the already low confidence level sinks even further.

After the divorce six years later, I decided to try my hand at writing again. I enrolled in a writer's class, but I was very rusty. The hardest part was trying to undo everything I came to believe about myself. By the end of the six month course, with the help of my instructor, I had a children's book ready to publish. I opted for the children's market because they are such a forgiving market with very little critics. Kids like anything, right? I never even sent the manuscript out. I never want to.

When I had proved to myself that I could at least do it, I set my writing goals aside to raise my children and start a new life. I was okay with that decision. Other things were more important to me at the time and I had yet to learn the fine art of balancing career, kids, and time for myself. I focused all my energies on the kids and our business.

Ten years later, the desire to write was awakened in me again after our son Owen died. I wrote a lot of poetry in the few months after his death and even started three separate books. Each with a different perspective on the silent death of stillbirth.

If I thought my writing skills were rusty before, they were all but corroded at this point. It was even harder to form tangible thoughts and more difficult to put them smoothly on paper. It was an easy decision to abandon my dream once again.

Five years later, this blog is a result of my restlessness. My urge to write is somewhat fulfilled by my ramblings here, but it still isn't enough. I decided last December that I wanted to follow my dream once again and write a book. But this time, I wanted to go about it differently. Rather than jump right in and become overwhelmed yet again, I decided to devote at least a half hour a day to writing something - anything. To do writing exercises daily to strengthen my craft. I subscribed to magazines such as Writer's Digest and Narrative Magazine in an effort to get "back in touch" with today's markets. The result is a notebook brimming with ideas and descriptive writings, poems and a bunch of ramblings that don't make any sense. And I continue to fill it daily even if it's simply writing down a quote that I think I'll reference someday.

I often wonder what will become of my little journals and scraps of paper if something ever happens to me. Who will find them and read them? What will they think about the person they didn't really know? Would they throw my thoughts away or treasure them as a keepsake?

Either way, I'm at least working toward my dream and have developed some habits that will make the journey easier.

(Yeah, my day got drastically rearranged and I had more time than I originally thought)

© 2006 Michelle (nnm)