Saturday, August 18, 2018

Why I started writing.

Our August topic is: What started you to write?

I can’t actually remember a time when I didn’t write. I was always scribbling something, somewhere. First with crayons, then with pencils and finally, joy of joys a fountain pen. The typewriter and computer came much, much later!

What I wrote seemed to be of far less importance than what I wrote with. My writing efforts were simply not appreciated by my family. At twelve-years-old, I was allowed to have the Girl comic as it was vetted and approved of by my parents for its educational qualities. From this source I began writing adventure stories for girls, one being a series about Virginia, Girl of the Golden West. My recollection of those early stories is that they were more than lurid, and I forgive my parents for their outright laughter on reading them.

I told stories to my children when they came along and we had tremendous fun with what we now call brainstorming. Each child had their chance to pick a topic, or start a story and off we would go, following the thread wherever it led us. I suppose I had always had a good imagination partly, I think, from being an early reader myself. I always had books around and made sure my children did, too. Because my daughter was into ponies, I decided to write a story about them for her thirteenth birthday.

I had no idea what I was doing, of course. I mistakenly thought writing chapters would be like writing lots of short stories and putting them together. Instead, I found it was hard work and I finished the book in time for my daughter's fifteenth birthday. But that whole process of putting a story together, like fitting pieces of a jigsaw together, fascinated and satisfied me like nothing else. I can only say I tinkered with writing from then on, cramped by a lack of confidence and no one to really share my ideas with.

It wasn’t until my late husband signed me up for a writing course that I got to grips with writing again. I found people who ‘got’ me, and I them. From small starts, I took up novel writing and now am happily working on book number eleven. Not a huge body of work, but one that satisfies me.

Visit these authors to see what inspired them.
  




7 comments:

  1. Hi Victoria, I didn't write stories but I did draw them. I too, don't have a large body of work but like you find the satisfaction of completing them more than enough.

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    1. Hah - a story-boarder! That is a good way to tell a story, too.

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  2. Love your idea of having the kids pick the topics and initiating stories. What a great beginning you give them. We have an annual family week summer vacation that always includes campfires every night and sometimes we have round robin stories. Each kid gets to start the story, but just a couple sentences, then it goes around the campfire with each person adding a little more to the story.

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    1. I love the spontaneity of story telling like that!

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  3. I loved your growth and path to becoming a writer, and loved Virginia, the Girl of the Golden West.

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  4. And as women, and wives and mothers, we write what we know, right? I love the feeling of falling in love, and of discovering with immense awe, that the love is requited! There's no better feeling! And writing romance novels and stories allows me to feel that jolt of joy often.

    As for your parents laughing at your early stories, I used to sit on the front stoop where I'd set up my Barbie houses, in the summer, and my Barbies were exotic spies who had jet-setting romances with dashing men from all over the world. My mom told me she used to stuff her fist into her mouth while she stood right inside the door, because she didn't want me to hear her laughing at my outlandish ideas of what love and sex were supposed to be like! Hopefully that's not the way readers react to my books!

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  5. I let my son dictate some of my latest novel. It only seemed fair since he helped me come up with the idea. After I told him I was going to go ahead and write a book about it, he insisted on certain elements that - though I fear they may be cliche - I hope he enjoys when the finished product hits his table.

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