Just Write
Aug 18
Writing is my passion, my release, my salve. If I could find a way for it to pay the bills, I would. However, if that were the case there would be no such use for the term “starving artist.” Actually, I have never fancied myself to be artistic. I can’t sing, paint, draw or manage to create anything crafty beyond the 2nd grade level. I guess I’ve discounted writing as art, my brain housing only one definition of artistic and writing wasn’t in the small print. It is time for that definition to change.
When I was little and unbound by my definitions, I used to be very creative. I would make collages, I would build houses filled with happy people out of construction paper and old shoeboxes. I would marvel at my handiwork. I would spend hours hunched over a desk, no use for a clock, creating. As I grew, I looked around and saw that others were better than me at drawing, creating tangible art. I assumed that meant I wasn’t artistic or destined to be creative. I put down my markers, my colorful paper. I spent the next twenty years, hidden away in other peoples creative visions – books. I was friends with librarians, I would read 50 books a year. I learned to love words and how they can be spun together like wool to make a story that covers you, if only for a moment.
I would hide my visions away in notebooks meant for my eyes only. I called them journals and I wrote to no audience in particular. Fiction wasn’t for me, the story was always the same. Telling life as I see it, looking for the turquoise blue in my hands full of life’s sea glass, that came natural. Still, until I started this blog, it was only for me and I often judged the quality of the words before they spilled onto the paper.
Yet, when I think about what has always driven me, what has always inspired me and filled my soul, the answer falls like silver coins from a slot machine and fills the floor around me: write. There is art in words. I am an artist.
Related posts:
Powered by FireStats
How cool is it that you have twitter updates on this page too . . .you are super creative and technologically fancy! Now we know where you have been spending all your time . . you tweeter; I have facebook down (not the privacy settings, I have to work on that) but twitter is a total mystery to me.
Betty – I am a total tweeter. That sounds weird….
I am totally in favor of your website for moms of boys. I thinks the main audience should be people who do not have boys so that they gain some understanding of what we go through. Yes, you are a wonderful writer and yes, it is an art.
Beth – I think I know who my co-author is!