31: The Writing Years
I wasn’t a kid who spent hours writing. I wanted to be an architect when I grew up, not an author. Back in the day, both sets of grandparents lived about eight hours away from our Alabama home. I spend the majority of time in the car designing interstate exchanges on graph paper. I kid you not, I literally drew infrastructure as a ten year old. I was an interesting child.
What else did I draw? Side profiles of cars. Elaborate mazes. Blueprints of houses. A comic about a puppy named Scraps. My first writing was actually a school project. It was about a kid being chased by a bad guy through the woods and into a shopping mall. Actually, now that I think of it, this plot sounds eerily similar to my most recent manuscript.
My writing passion began during my first year of teaching. I implemented two writing times per week. Kids would come in, unpack, and write for a minimum of ten minutes. Then we’d share. At the beginning of the year the kids mainly sat there, struggling to come up with anything. By the end of the year they’d be filling notebook pages with wildly random stories, often a new chapter of something from the previous week. Try to follow along with a second grader’s rambling plot—I dare you.
I wrote with the kids. I also shared with the kids. They loved it, especially when I wrote about them. Through the years, my writing became less like Louis Sachar’s quick mini-story chapters and more like a Magic Treehouse novel. Kids played roles, be it animals or wizards or fairies or digital entities. Although our weekly writing times have faded (thanks CKLA Amplify), my end of year stories have continued.
When I say I have a dozen drafts waiting to be revised, I mean it. I have a story about a beagle’s travels to Cat-a-fornia to find his family. Another story is about a boy in search of the infamous “Pretty Flower,” an item in a legend told to break the reign of an evil ruler. I came up with a story of two kids being zapped through our classroom screen into a digital world, determined to save their missing friends. I’ve written knockoffs of Harry Potter and Pokemon. I have stories of kids turned into aliens, dinosaurs, ants , zoo animals, Christmas fairies, and even guinea pigs. Nineteen stories have been preserved digitally. The others are printed out and kept in a big box somewhere upstairs.
As I wait to build my writing savings account up for developmental editing and sit on my most recently finished manuscript, I have plenty to keep myself busy. Write on, friends. Write on.
