My fingers feel the miniscule titillating sensation of friction as the hard tip of the pen scours the delicate surface of the paper with dark stains. Somehow, miraculously, those dark stains take the images and words out of my mind giving them the power to put ideas into the minds of others who somehow come across them later in time. I have the power to construct in the head of a total stranger a different world with living, breathing characters who become important even though they will never meet in person. My ideas, my observations, enter the minds of others, touch them in ways I did not imagine as I wrote them. That is an amazing power that should not be taken lightly.
Why? Why shouldn’t it be taken lightly? Because it has an effect on the minds of others intended or not. It is a responsibility. A responsibility to do what? To push the envelope, to respect the boundaries, to create mystery, to answer questions, to create worlds, to prevent destruction, to titillate the mind, to reinforce the soul.
Not everyone believes they are capable of handling such power. Others don’t believe that power exists. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe not in your world. It does in mine.
As a writer, I must love that power. No! It’s scary. To me, it’s scary. Maybe to other writers, it isn’t. I can only speak for myself, obviously.
Why is it scary? In a word, rejection.
Allow me to back up before tackling the painful topic of rejection.
If writing is so scary, why do I do it? To answer that question, I need to think back to my adolescence.
My teenaged years happened during the 80s. I was a typical, latch-key kid, Gen Xer. A school day meant going home to an empty house – just me and my dog, Bandi. An amazing dog, by the way. She kept me grounded. She wasn’t enough to keep the blues away. I needed the outlet of writing to do that.
At some point, I came across an empty journal that belonged to one of my older sisters. Didn’t seem anyone was planning on using it, so I did. I had an urge to write down my thoughts and feelings. Shortly after, I was given a diary for my birthday. Those two books gave me a creative outlet that prevented me from diving into deep despair. Yes, I am capable of deep despair. You don’t want to know how deep I can go.
When I was fifteen, I fell in love for the first time, hard, really hard. It ended in heartbreak. How did I deal with it? I wrote it out, what happened, every moment, in story form in another journal. Writing it out gave me the opportunity to sort out my feelings in a safe, self-reflective way. It allowed me to grieve the loss quietly without the interference of others to judge me.
After it was completed in a story form, I had my first wave of fear from writing. What if someone found the journal and read it? What if it was used against me to make fun of me? What if it was passed around to other people so they could make fun of me too? My programming of connecting fear of judgment with my own musings was born, and it wasn’t a pretty baby. I tore out the pages, ripped them up, and threw them away. I regret that now. I wish I could go back decades later and read the details of my first true love and heart break. It would serve me well today.
Unfortunately, fear of others seeing too much into my inner being was a source of fear from that day on. I was afraid my thoughts and ideas would never be appreciated by anyone.
I wrote short stories, poetry, essays outside of school assignments analyzing my own thoughts, and copying verses from the Bible. I wrote and wrote and tossed and tossed.
Let me back up a bit. At one time, the summer after sixth grade, I wrote a story about a boy and his dog. The dog died. His parents got him a puppy. He repeatedly rejected the puppy until something happened where the outcome was the puppy helped the boy grieve his previous beloved dog. I showed that story to my sixth grade teacher whom I’m certain was surprised to see me during the summer. She loved the story! She wanted me to rewrite it more legibly so she could send it off to publishers. She believed it was worthy of professional publication as a children’s book written by a child.
When I got home and set the notebook aside to go play as children that age do, my sister saw the notebook and threw it away. That hurt me so much, I was never able to rewrite the story. It was lost for good.
After that, all my writing until later adulthood was for me and me alone. I trusted no one.
By the time I wrote a book that I actually wanted published I was well into my 40s. I had been through a very trying time in my life. Instead of writing the true account of what happened in all its gory details, I wrote a story that mirrored some specific events but not exactly. I made up names and places. I created other events that were dramatically different. A new world was created from my own imagination and experiences.
I didn’t want to publish it right away. My husband did. He was proud of what I had accomplished and wanted the world to see it. That was our first stint at independent publishing.
The book didn’t do well. Not at all. It’s still available if anyone wishes to purchase it. It’s on this website at the time I publish this blog on it. It’s called Shattered Crystal. It’s okay. It’s amateurish. It’s my best attempt at that time of my life. I am proud enough of it less because of its quality and more because it is constant proof to me of my overcoming nature.
It was followed very rapidly by Between Layers of Earth, also available at the time of this blog. Now this book I am super proud of! It also mirrors some feelings of my own I have worked through in writing it, but not the experiences themselves. Those are all fiction. I love that book! I hope you do too.
That’s how it really feels to write and put something out there. At least for me it is. It’s a piece of me, a piece of my soul that had been bruised and battered, needed healing, and needed sorting out. Writing does that for me. It heals and sorts and puts things in place where they need to be.
My next book does that as well, The Power of Ketchup. I hope I myself love that book as much as Between Layers of Earth. This book is a piece of my very soul I am sharing with the world.
Yes, that is what I am doing. As you read one of my books or one of my blogs, or any of my musings, you are looking into my very being, seeing into my soul, examining a damaged piece of my heart. You are experiencing it healing. Hopefully, you are being healed along with me as you read. That would be the ultimate goal – for you to come away with something as important to you as it was to me but for completely different reasons.
Thank you for reading,
Sarah
Humor in Chaos
You are a great writer! It is inspiring to hear others writing diaries. I have been writing my diary since 5th grade with typing it as of 2012.
It takes a lot of humility and guts to write a blog of yourself. Keep up the good work and know that God is always there for you as he guides you towards your destiny.