Every one has the potential to be a writer, some better than others, but all posses the basic qualities needed to write. Some learn to write at an early age. Yet with illiteracy becoming a growing epidemic we are slowly losing the ability to think for ourselves, to create what has never been, to inspire the world. Once there were great writers in the world. The question is where have they gone?
I learned to write at an early age. I remember knowing how to spell my whole family’s names at the age of three. While my mom decorated my third birthday cake I “helped” her carefully spell out each frosting letter on the giant red ladybug. Even by then I knew how to sing, memorize, use full sentences, read Dr. Suess stories. That must have been when I learned to love to read, because I have loved it ever since. Silly things like red and blue fish amused me, and later I consumed page after page of our home library. But it didn’t seem to be enough. I wanted to be the creator. I wanted to write brilliant things that deprived other people of sleep when they were drawn too deep even to breath into an alluring tale. Unfortunately, I have never become half so brilliant as I would have like to have been.
But I tried. I spent hours pouring my heart out into notebook after notebook. I kept a pen on me at all times, left a notebook under my pillow to jot down those brilliant thoughts that crept upon me in those too common sleepless hours. With all the practice and all the time invested into those lines one would think I had come up with at least a decent page or two. I don’t recall ever doing so, although I did learn to love to write.
English became a favorite subject of mine sometime during the seventh grade when an assignment was given on Lewis and Clark in Social Studies. (And I know, Social Studies isn’t English.) Instead of actually doing the assignment a friend and I wrote a quite delightful poem on the horrors of history in a dreaded room thirteen, Mr. Robert’s classroom. Our friends all seemed to love it and Mr. Roberts thought it quite accurate. It was the first poem I ever composed.
I’m not a poet. I don’t write well. But it has never stopped me. Anything I ever had to say that I couldn’t share with anyone could be written down and, if needed, later torn. Lists were composed containing all the wishes I had for my life, all the memories I’d made with my friends. I even tried to keep a journal, on several occasions. Which I never could (I don’t have half the dedication or desire to keep up on a journal). Pencils could be found In every pocket of every pair of jeans I owned and little purple pens accumulated under my pillows. My best work was more than likely found in the margins of math assignments and in books I’d been reading or torn pages out of. Sitting down to write never worked out well for me. Instead, I got ideas while completely preoccupied with other things like school or work. I still take notes if I have an interesting thought in the middle of the day or during a math quiz.
Even though I loved to scribble little thoughts down, I have never liked to share my work with others. I can stand in front of a class and tell everyone who killed who and who did what about any book. I can tear my way through any writing assignment and give some made up opinion to any report. And pass the assignment. One of my favorite things about writing is that you really don’t have to know a thing, you only have to be creative. That is, after all, what writing is all about. To pass any English class all you have to do is be original and do the work at least half decently. The only thing that is required of anyone to be a good writier is the write what isn’t and has never been and a good writer is born.
I am not a good writer. But writing is a wonderful, universal, thing. Each of us can be writers if we try. Including me.
