(Photo by Helen Montoya Henrichs.)
I wrote my first book when I was five.
It sounded a whole lot like Little House on the Prairie, because my mom had just finished reading the series to me. There were two sisters named Laura and Mary and a ma and pa and a little dog, though I changed his name to Chance, since that was my dog’s name.
I don’t remember the details of my stories, but I do remember that they were printed neatly on white drawing paper, and I drew a picture on every page, even though, in all the years after, I would stop drawing because I believed I wasn’t any good at it. I remember, too, my mom’s words when I finished another to add to the stack: You’ll be a writer someday.
I always believed it.
There were more “copycat” stories after the Laura and Mary ones, about an orphan named Anne and her search for a family and a best friend in a place like Avonlea. My mom would patiently staple all those pages together, and she would carry them to Thanksgiving with the family so she could show her grandpa, my Graddad’n.
He is a giant in my memories. He’d flip through those books and then he’d take me on his lap and tell me about his railroad days and then the years he spent as a newspaper man. And then he’d point to my stories and he’d say, You’ll write me a book someday.
It was never a question, just an observation, and those words burrowed straight into a 7-year-old heart.
It wasn’t until I turned 10 that I started creating my own stories. The first, about a paralyzed girl and her three best friends who got kidnapped, showed youthful hope in the way a wheelchair-bound girl miraculously found her legs and saved them all. It was all handwritten on lined paper, and my fifth grade teacher was so impressed she submitted it to a literary magazine that took juvenile-written fiction, and I was published.
And then there was the summer before my sixth grade year, just after my mom and dad divorced. My dad decided he wanted to take my brother and sister and me for a month that summer, and I had never been away from my mom for so long.
I packed my notebook, because it was the only thing that really felt safe, and I spent the summer buried in books or writing in that notebook. I penned a story in longhand about a girl and her friends, about to graduate from high school, who decided one night they’d race a train. It was tragic and dark and reflective of meeting a new stepmother and a half-sister and brand new half-brother.
I have always loved the feel of words on a page, the way a collection of thoughts can turn into a piece of art. I have always loved carving a block of nothingness into a masterpiece. I have always loved the stories that lived and breathed and moved in my deepest places.
I had to let them out.
There was never any question about whether I should let them out. But there was a question whether it would make a difference.
Sometimes, as writers, we can begin to believe we have nothing to offer because we aren’t rich and we aren’t traveled and we haven’t seen a whole lot of the world and maybe never will.
And maybe that means we can’t write good stories.
But I’ve learned over the years that it’s not how much of the world you’ve seen. It’s more about the stories you’ve written with your life.
Because, whether we like it or not, the stories we’ve written with our lives are the stories that find their way to a page.
I grew up poor and fatherless and took responsibility for my 10-months-older brother and three-years-younger sister so my mom could work two jobs to make ends meet. I should have been a statistic on the why-they-failed list, but, instead, I used those experiences in stories and those stories made sense of my life.
That makes me think we owe it to ourselves to tell our stories. The ones we’ve seen, the ones we’ve lived, the ones we’ve wanted to live or are glad we didn’t live.
We can bare them in nonfiction or hide them in fiction, or we can create the worlds we wish had existed, but it takes courage to share them all.
They are all windows into who we are.
And there is a mystery we’ll find here in the sharing. We think the stories of our lives are a finite source, that the well will eventually run dry. But I have discovered that the more we give away, the more we find we have to give away.
Will we choose to give, or will we choose to keep?
What is your story about becoming a writer or a creator? How did you know that’s what you wanted to be?
Welcome to The Ink Well Creative Community.
The Ink Well Community is evolving. While this used to be a place where I posted a prompt for writers to share their creative works, I have been receiving several inquiries about my process, how I create and read and manage a household with half a dozen little ones. So I thought we could turn this into a community of people who share about the creative process in all its many facets, from where we find our inspiration to when we find time to create (especially if we work other jobs). I’ll be sharing struggles about my creative life and logistical information about my particular creative process and what I’m learning about creativity, among many other things. I hope you’ll weigh in with your own struggles and observations and lessons. Let’s start a conversation. Let’s encourage one another. Let’s live the creative life together.
And if you have your own questions about creativity or process or inspiration, feel free to visit my contact page and send me a note.
