The Write Encouragement

When I was a small child, my mother read to me every night. Those moments were very special to me. It was the time of day when I got my mom all to myself. I begged her to read me another story and another until she’d read every golden book in my tiny collection. I know that love of reading gave birth to my love of writing. Certain personality traits and events in my life nurtured that squalling infant into the insatiable beast it is today.


I’ve always had an overactive imagination. Not the kind that imagines gray, spindly arms with open wounds extending from beneath the bed skirt to grab your ankles when you try to find the bathroom in the dark. Well, yeah, that kind too, but my imagination is even more bizarre. It makes up people. People that seem real to me. Maybe it’s just schizophrenia. Instead of talking to them in a loud voice while I walk down the street, I write stories about them. I heard somewhere that intelligent, imaginative children often invent an imaginary friend. Friend? Only one? I had seven of them. When I was three. Since then I’ve invented hundreds.

As a child, I did more daydreaming than writing. I’d make up characters and scenarios in my head, but I never wrote them down. It honestly never occurred to me that I should. The writing bug didn’t bite me until I was in junior high school. I distinctly remember being asked to write the ending to some short story. I don’t recall what the story was. I do remember that there were two male lead characters and their constant bickering wedged a riff in a small town, which led to major upset, chaos, and tragedy. I think it was set in the colonial times.

At the end of the original story, the two men were trapped under a log and had no choice but to talk about their differences and make nice, but it never said what happened to them or if they escaped the log. Anyway, most of the class wrote their ending so the lead characters were saved by the townspeople and lived happily ever after. Some had them lay there trapped until they starved to death. I had the townspeople form an angry mob and set the log on fire. (Wow, I was evil!) Looking back on that I’m not sure why my English teacher thought it was the greatest thing ever, but she raved about that story and read it aloud to the entire class. All of her classes, actually. Even classes I wasn’t in. She then passed it around to all the English teachers and they started harassing me to join the journalism club. I never joined. Writing wasn’t my thing. I still remember how embarrassed I was to hear my words read aloud to an audience of bored eighth graders. They thought the fire was cool, though!

I must have been secretly pleased by that incident because after that I started writing. Secretly. No one knew about my hobby. I didn’t consider it a career choice. Just fun! Other teachers encouraged me to write, too. In high school. In college. Even in graduate school. So what did I major in? Science.

Around the same time that I started writing for fun, I discovered romance novels. I loved reading them. Still do. I guess it only makes sense that I’d eventually write them. I love that even more. My favorite parts? The passionate kisses, tender caresses, and the fiery sex scenes. That’s probably why I write those parts in abundance. :-)

Has a teacher (or someone else) ever encouraged you to explore strengths you didn’t know you had?