I remember clearly the first story I wrote. It was about a rabbit that went to the moon because he thought it was made of carrots. I was six.
I got more serious about it at age eleven. I remember lying on my bed, the top bunk of a set of bunk beds i shared with my brother, and immersing myself in making up stories. I even got one published in the school magazine. I'm glad I don't have a copy of it. I'm sure it was cringe-worthy.
I've written a lot of stories and poems over time. But why? I think it's because I could do it by myself. I spent a lot of time alone as a kid. I read a lot, too, and it gave me ideas. I became obsessed with making something different from the things other people made. I was no good at it, of course. Beginners rarely are. And so I would give up for periods of time. I wanted to be an actress, but that required me to interact with other people. Mostly I just didn't have the nerve to fail so publicly, so I wrote instead, and imagined.
I was bullied a lot from eleven to when I graduated from high school, so I learned to avoid other kids. I wanted to prove I was good at something. I wanted, for a while, to be richer and more famous than anyone else, but it didn't take long before those goals started to feel empty. And the words in my head wouldn't shut up. I would make descriptive paragraphs in my head as I walked down the street. I didn't just look, I transformed visuals into narrative.
Whenever I go through a period of being alone, I write. It's almost a magical process. In one story, spirits came to visit me at night and I would awaken to find a new section of story written on my pages. All my attempts at capturing the numinous nature of the process have depicted some kind of otherworldly influence. Because that's how it felt to me. Still does when it's going right.
Maybe this is why I can get righteously indignant when people don't take it seriously. For me, it's everything. It's the only reliable path to finding what things really mean. I don't mean what's real, in a substantive, scientific sense. Though science is of interest to me, I find it lacking. It never gets to the thing I want to understand. What connects us?What deep down at the core of thinking does it mean to live with a human mind going twenty-four/seven in the midst of other such beings?
I'm asking some other writers to do guestposts about their reasons for writing. So expect more.
I got more serious about it at age eleven. I remember lying on my bed, the top bunk of a set of bunk beds i shared with my brother, and immersing myself in making up stories. I even got one published in the school magazine. I'm glad I don't have a copy of it. I'm sure it was cringe-worthy.
I've written a lot of stories and poems over time. But why? I think it's because I could do it by myself. I spent a lot of time alone as a kid. I read a lot, too, and it gave me ideas. I became obsessed with making something different from the things other people made. I was no good at it, of course. Beginners rarely are. And so I would give up for periods of time. I wanted to be an actress, but that required me to interact with other people. Mostly I just didn't have the nerve to fail so publicly, so I wrote instead, and imagined.
I was bullied a lot from eleven to when I graduated from high school, so I learned to avoid other kids. I wanted to prove I was good at something. I wanted, for a while, to be richer and more famous than anyone else, but it didn't take long before those goals started to feel empty. And the words in my head wouldn't shut up. I would make descriptive paragraphs in my head as I walked down the street. I didn't just look, I transformed visuals into narrative.
Whenever I go through a period of being alone, I write. It's almost a magical process. In one story, spirits came to visit me at night and I would awaken to find a new section of story written on my pages. All my attempts at capturing the numinous nature of the process have depicted some kind of otherworldly influence. Because that's how it felt to me. Still does when it's going right.
Maybe this is why I can get righteously indignant when people don't take it seriously. For me, it's everything. It's the only reliable path to finding what things really mean. I don't mean what's real, in a substantive, scientific sense. Though science is of interest to me, I find it lacking. It never gets to the thing I want to understand. What connects us?What deep down at the core of thinking does it mean to live with a human mind going twenty-four/seven in the midst of other such beings?
I'm asking some other writers to do guestposts about their reasons for writing. So expect more.
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