When Did It All Begin?

Don't be alarmed - I'm not getting all philosophical. I was thinking the other day about my ongoing journey into writing and a thought bounced into my head: When did all of this start? When did I find myself drawn toward stories and storytelling, particularly of the kind we write about? It turns out, the answer to this is not as easy as one might think - at least as far as I am concerned. The more I got thinking about this, the more I realized it's a pretty deep rabbit hole to dive into. And yes, I felt I was up to the challenge.

Now, regular readers of this blog (or literally anyone who went back to read my first post, "Starting off as a writer,") know my foray into the actual art of writing started off as a severe liver infection that prompted me to start writing down all the stories bouncing around in my head. Simple, yes, but all the storytelling stuff and the writing stuff goes back well before that. I actually took a writing workshop course when I was fourteen as part of my high-school curriculum but it didn't go well, mostly because I was a very distracted fourteen and wasn't willing to dedicate the time and energy required for the study of writing. Furthermore, I definitely wasn't ready for the poetry part that would come the following semester - that would only come much later. This tells me that the interest was there even in my early teens, just not the focus.

Now, I did love to tell a good story back when I was six - at least according to my parents, who serve as biased source material. Apparently, someone asking me how my day was could trigger a long, winding yarn about everything that happened and drift into some things that clearly did not happen, but I was just loving the chance to be in that storytelling space. Looking back at some very early writing projects (like kindergarten), however, makes it readily apparent that I did not have the grammatical skills nor the patience to write all these wonderful tales down. After all, at that age I was still mastering things like not getting the letter 'e' backward and staying on the lines. Writing a sentence was challenging (and kind of boring considering how I preferred to just blurt things out), so the stories were there, just not the writing.

Why am I saying all this? I think it all gets down to the fact that we all have stories flowing through us, and for some of us, those stories are load-bearing entities holding us together. The writing of them, however, requires a few magical ingredients to get thrown into the pot before it all reaches critical mass and we begin our little journey. Now, these ingredients aren't going to mix themselves, and sometimes we have to add the last few touches to kick things off - inspiration, time, sentiment, something - because they need that little push.

So if you are feeling the urge to be a writer but there's something not quite there yet, start looking around for what inspired you in the past, for what moves you, for what gets you inspired, then ask yourself what's missing. Sometimes all it takes is just sitting down and typing, but other times it takes a larger step. And unless you are fortunate enough to get a severe liver infection, you will have to find that one yourself.