As long as I can remember I’ve loved to write. When in high school I would have enjoyed it more if it had been deemed as cool. Unfortunately it wasn’t so I played football, baseball, and briefly wrestled. All were things you could do and not be thought of as a dork or nerd. Looking back I find it rather tragic that all things resembling a classroom and requiring brain power was not cool. I know this may sound trite and many may think, the first item in a long list of excuses but it’s not, really. I do sometimes wish I had been stronger and smart enough to plan for the future but that didn’t happen. As it turned out I didn’t excel at sports either, other than baseball. That was something I both loved to play and was halfway decent. Again, even though I loved to play, it did nothing for me after high school. This is where the “what-ifs” start to pop up, what if I had applied myself and tried to do more than just enough to get by? What if I had worked on my own to improve what I wanted to do, as in write? Since the laws of physics will not allow us to go back in time to have a do over, the “what-ifs” are a complete waste of time.
English: Logo of General Motors Corporation. Source:
What can I do about it now? For starters I’ve tried to share these feelings with my children and grandchildren. Unfortunately for my kids, I didn’t really have this “revelation of the “what-ifs” until I was in my late thirties. You know, that sweet time in life when you look around and wonder where the time has gone. That was about the time when General Motors closed the plant I had worked at for ten years, the place I had planned to retire from. We all have hiccups in our lives but this one really made me think. At that point in time I did a few things to right my perceived wrongs. I went back to college while I was working full-time as a desk clerk at a motel. I don’t recommend this to anyone. It was also around this time when I started writing. I took a class at Miami University on Creative Writing. I absolutely loved the class. A consequence of this class was learning I could write stories that others liked to read. I also learned that the feeling I received when others read something I wrote and liked it bordered on the incredible. It was more than being accepted as a writer it was validation of the feelings I had when I would write.
Everyone who loves to write may not arrive along the same paths and may not all enjoy writing the same things. One thing we all share is that feeling we get when a story or an article or a report is flying out of our fingers while they pound the keyboard. That feeling of creating characters or opening the eyes of readers about a problem they have and offering a solution. I don’t know about you but that’s a feeling I don’t want to give up. I’ll continue to write as long as I physically can. Whether it’s good or bad writing I still love the process. In my case I love creating characters, building settings hoping the reader can smell the coffee as the waitress pours it into a cup on the counter. I don’t know about you but I love to write and I plan on doing it for a long time.
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