If you had asked me in high school, college, or even graduate school if I liked to write. My answer would have been a resounding NO. I hated to write. In Creative Writing, which I had to take in high school and college, my stories were a stretched paragraph. Not quite as short as my summary of the movie the Titanic: The boat sank. But close. And in Grad School my thesis took forever to get down on paper.
Why do I write? How did I ever come to embrace, to absolutely live for the written word?
My writing started with wanting to produce a simple children's story when I was the mystery reader for Ri-Ah's kindergarten class. I read to her all the time and I wanted something different for her and her classmates. While walking the middle one in the stroller, I came up with the idea of Sarah and the Jelly Jars. A picture book story about a little girl that finds a stash of jelly jars and recipes when she and her family moves from Bainbridge Island, Washington to Stockbridge, Massachusetts. The making of the jelly helps the little girl accept and see the possibilities in the move. There was to be a jelly recipe at the back of the book.
I never finished this book. What happened is, it took on a life of its own. Growing from 28 picture book pages to a whooping 178 full text pages; so many changes, so many additions and enhancements to the story line.
It's been seven years in the making, and it's still not complete -- almost, but not quite. Soon. Yesterday, I had my work space laid out before me and, as usual, before I started to write I closed my eyes and slipped between the pages. I try to become the characters, so that my fingers will type what they feel, what they say -- and not what I say.
But still I wonder where all these twisting and turning ideas come from. Over the course of the last three or four years I have discovered some very powerful similarities between my book and the circumstances in our house. For example, in my book the little girl finds a box filled with letters and cards, etc... in the attic, and I found a box full of cards in our attic. I found out that two sisters lived in this house two sets of owners ago. (During World War II.) In my book, the little girl discovers that two woman lived in her house, and her classmates tell her that the women haunt the house. (Again, during World War II.)
Am I a ghost's writer?
2 comments:
I so adore hearing a writer's process...how she comes to embrace the written word and how the story's seed blossomed.
I also love the twist on your last line in this post.
Congrats on almost being done with the book.
I would never have guessed that you didn't always enjoy writing. I did.
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