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My on-again, off-again love affair with writing

I have no idea how young I was when I started writing, but when I was 12, I wrote a comedy fiction series called My Summer as a Camp Counselor or How to Commit Suicide in Ten Easy Lessons.  My audience was my 6 year old sister and her friends.  They were very enthusiastic and I tasted the joy of writing for others and being well-received.

The only things I have ever gotten published (no payment) were a poem for a local newspaper about how stagnant our town had become and how we should look to a neighboring city for lessons on how to grow, and a satirical guest editorial for my college newspaper about how I decided to go to school  in Florida to escape the  cold North, and ended up freezing to death in an over-air-conditioned classroom.  It was called Little Blue Sandra.

In my late second childhood when I was in my 50’s, I took a creative writing class in the local community college and received a plaque proclaiming I was the most out-standing student in Creative Writing.  It was a fun class and I learned things.  Then my real life and my job started taking up all of my time and I didn’t even think about writing for a while.

Except that every now and then a phrase pops into my head.  A title. The name of a character and what it is about him or her that is interesting.  I see people waiting in line and before they reach the counter, I’ve given them a complete life history and hopes and dreams.  I feel I know them.  So far I’ve refrained from talking to them about it.

I miss being a writer.  But I worry about letting myself get too involved again.  I can’t afford to stay up until the wee hours of the morning just because the words keeping coming and I’ve got to write them down.  How am I going to get up at 5:15 so I can go to work?  So I just keep having those mental snatches of writing instead.

But writing is writing, whether you call it blogging or journaling, or emailing a friend.  The truth of the matter is I love words.  I love the way they feel in my fingers as I’m typing them out.  I love the sounds they make in mind, the visuals they create at the back of my eyes.  Someone once told me you don’t have to get paid to be a writer.  I guess that’s true.