First of all, I'm sorry to those at Drollerie for being late. Today knocked me for a loop, as my dad would say, healthwise. I'm not doing well just for basics. Doing the tiny bits I can when I can -- but anyway, I figured you guys deserved an explanation in brief. Now on to the blog post! This month I have Heather Ingemar discussing how she started out as a writer. Enjoy! And if you want to see my own origin post, head over to Meredith's blog...
Origin Stories blog post, 2/28/09
By Heather S. Ingemar
When people ask, I tell them I've always been a teller of tales.
I did not, however, always know I'd be a writer.
Beginnings are usually rough and full of pot-holes, and mine was no exception. Writing, in the beginning, was difficult at best, though I read like a starving man ate at a feast and possessed a vocabulary above my age-level. That whole grammar thing.... I'll be the first to admit I did not grasp the semantics easily and failed at parsing. But I heard words like music, and putting my thoughts onto paper was natural.
It was even better when the scribbles on the paper reflected what I had in my head, a trick it took me until college to learn. There were no creative writing classes in my early education, none in high school, and the single poetry class I took in junior high drove me to fill journal after journal with the combinations of lovely-sounding words I thought up. (I still have them all.) For years, I wrote. The important thing to remember if you're serious about writing is that it doesn't happen over night. "Rome wasn't built in a day," and all that.
I, however, was not a poet, and fiction was too daunting a prospect to pursue (though I did make a few attempts -- the allure of telling the tales cooked up by my imagination was too much to resist at times). Often, I would swear off writing fiction for months, years at a time, but the fascination with stories kept calling to me. Here’s another bit of advice: if you have really got a bug to do something, follow it. No matter how difficult a road.
It took me until college to sufficiently develop my writing skills to where I could write. I had a wonderful professor by the name of Claire Davis who pushed me and convinced me to pursue words. Under her guidance, I went from a lost & confused English major, to a woman with a passion. In that class, I created. Futhermore, I finished things. Stories suddenly had endings, and I had the means to write them.
That's how I began.
And as for my stories, they've always been there, waiting to be heard.
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