My focus in reading was in finding someone/something as a child that I could befriend without having to sell myself out, and reading gave me that. Sooner or later my brain got the idea that if I could read and find that kind of connection, then maybe I could write and find it, too. I felt this way despite the fact that I had no idea about social networking in the late seventies, not to mention no idea of how to publish anything.
I started out with a small, pink, Hello Kitty-decorated journal that was about the size of a deck of playing cards, and probably the most important thing that I wrote in that book was my reaction to the final episode of M*A*S*H, which I didn't get to see because I was too young. (I was also too young to see the series, but that didn't stop me from remarking on the passing of the show.) There weren't many pages filled--the binding wasn't extensive writing-friendly and I wasn't much of a Hello Kitty fan. A couple of years after that I sat down with plain paper and, with the help of an older cousin, came up with a book of poetry. They were very much humorous poems, and were more fun to write than to read, by my suspicions. But they broke open the flood gates. I wanted to write. I wrote all kinds of wild things from that point on--teachers gave me the assignment to write newspaper articles in grade school, and not only did I write them, but I drew them in the shape of a newspaper article cut out of an actual newspaper; I wrote an essay about a sandwich that staggered a sixth grade teacher; instead of writing just another paper about the Holocaust, I wrote a short story about woman in this country subjugated to the same thing, using all of the imagery from the non-fiction accounts from the Holocaust; I wrote reports so well that teachers demanded to know where I plagiarized them from; I spent my free periods split between the newspaper room and the band practice room; I wrote an editorial piece in the paper my senior year that got me in deep trouble with the principal.
I loved writing. The one thing I wanted to avoid, however, was going to college for writing. I was bound and determined that shouldn't happen, to the point that when I moved to Missouri I went to College of the Ozarks, but not to attend classes. I went to their library and read "literary" magazines, namely three: The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Harper's (not Harper's Bazaar). I read, I wrote on what I read, I went home. I knew very little of the classic or academic writers--my mother raised us on stuff appropriate to kids, and rarely that stuff was appropriate to kids. I read amazing things in those magazines, particularly in their fiction selections, and I tried a novel of my own, written long-hand on legal pads and filling a Justin boot box. (And no, that novel no longer exists. No bribing with my old and bad writing of 19 years.)
Oddly enough, an employer who was taking classes recommended that I take a literature class from the instructor that she was attending, and, on a dare, I did. Hence, my college career. Please remember, I did not go to college for writing--my major was literature and my minor was history. Did I take writing classes? At the end, yes. At the end I didn't want to end my college years. At the end I didn't want an end--I planned to go on to get my Masters and teach literature while writing great short stories for The New Yorker.
Then life happened.
In the spring of 2001, shortly after gaining my BA and debating where to go for the next stage, I wrote a story, as I was prone to do in my condition of permanent pen in hand, about a daughter who's jealous of her father's dog, which he gets to take the place of his deceased wife. I thought the story was all ironic and literary, and filed it with the rest of the stories that I wrote as first drafts so that it could simmer while I cranked out other pieces. A friend of mine at the time from California was giving me a lot of tips at the time as a reader--I would make the mistake of writing an occasional romance, and, due to my lack of sexual experience (check that, embarrassingly NO sexual experience at that time) she felt the need to correct me. The story of the dog replacing the dead wife was a reactionary piece--this chick didn't know anything about deceased mothers--so THERE. (I didn't either, but that was a moot point--I was "writing to discover.")
Just as I was starting the next short story, two things happened:
- I had waited too long to decide on the next academic step, and the nice student loan people started wanting their money back, and
- My mother was diagnosed with cancer.
The first thing was expected--here I was, applying for the fall, and should have thought about it for the spring semester after graduation. The second thing stunned me--I never would have thought that my mother would get breast cancer (it wasn't in the family history) and, well, I wrote that story. My rationalization: that'll learn ya, Jo, you predicted your mother's death in a short story. That'll teach ya.
The next time I finished a short story was 2009. Do the math. I'll wait.
So what was I writing for eight years? Journaling. A lot of journaling. Then blogging. Then Tweeting. (I was Tweeting before I went back to writing short stories. That's deep-seated weight.) Between the "friend" who felt that I didn't know what I was talking about with sex (I found another way to get her back--I had some. I wish I could say it was worth the revenge, but to this day I would rather read about someone convincingly falling in love vs. someone having sex. For me, sex isn't worth the words) and the responsibility I felt for killing my mother off with a premature-written story, I was too scared to pick up a pen to make something up. I was more concerned with getting my crazy new existence in California down, in a frame of mind of "Jesus, you won't believe THIS" sort of way.
Sooner or later that got old, and I took a class with UC Berkeley dealing with turning life experience into fiction. (In this class I wrote a short story where the female character died and her brother came to take care of the funeral. I figured that if I were to kill family members I would start with me, so that everyone else stayed safe.) Shortly after I finished that class I came back from lunch one day at work and flipped onto my right hand in the dock of my workplace (wanna hear that story? Read here).
Square one.
*****
One thing leads to another, and before I fall into a quote from a John Lennon song we should probably just acknowledge that I not only have the use of my hand back, but that I have the use of my time back. Yes, I'm working on a short story. No, I haven't finished it yet, but I have a collection of stories that I did finish from my class, and that gives me encouragement. Friends give me encouragement. Readers give me encouragement. And I take the encouragement and add it to the pile of writing and reading that I do and realize that I was meant to do maybe two other things in my life. Time to stop fighting it.
Onward, dear reader.
P.S.--I can give you a vague memory of when I started reading. I feel that I have been writing, however, since I was born.
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