awakeYou know you want some.
truepenny posted some on what made her start writing. And I can't answer that question, because I don't honestly remember. I just remember that in first or second grade, something in my head kicked over the idea that real people wrote stories and poetry, and I decided that I was going to do it too.The first things I wrote were some poems that were probably best lost, and some short fiction about race horses and dinosaurs. (Not in the same stories; no Godzilla versus Bambi here.) There was a heavy Walter Farley influence in the horse stories (I was basically rewriting his stories in my own words with the character names changed) and a heavy Jim Kjelgaard/Jack London influence on the dinosaur stories.
I tried to quit once, when I was twenty-six or twenty-seven. It didn't take. I lasted about three years before I broke.
Although the odd thing is, all through high school and college, I wrote poetry much more commonly than fiction--I did pretty well in poetry slams for a while, even--and now I hardly write poetry at all.
Sometimes, I miss it. But when I try, the words that come out are mostly terrible. I broke it somehow, and now it doesn't go.
Maybe I have a brain that can handle poetry or fiction, and in learning to write linear narratives, I've made the other thing go away.
Maybe it will come back some day.
All right. Chapter 8. Back at it, Bear.