WHY I WRITE

“Cogito ergo sum / Sum ergo scribo”
(pardon my poor Latin: but the idea should be clear)

Though I didn’t know it then, I can recall the moment writing captured me. I was only about four or five years old. My mother was teaching me to recognize and write the alphabet. I was caught up in the adventure of learning how the symbols had meaning, how they could fit together. “Cat” and “dog” made me smile in recognition, and I made my mom show me “peanut butter”. It was a long word and it somehow looked right to me.

It was when my mom started showing me how to write my own name that it happened. I looked at my scrawling, misshapen, name on the paper and suddenly it hit me. There on the page was “Davy” and under that “David”. Both were my name – were me. Somehow seeing my name on paper captivated me. It seemed somehow magical and wondrous that those letters meant “me”. It was eager to learn what else the magical alphabet could tell me. That sense of awe and wonder led me to read early, read hungrily, and read for knowledge.

Soon after this I became enthralled by the ability of words to tell stories. My dad had told me how his family would listen to the radio and of the fantastic stories he would hear. A local radio station would rebroadcast some of them on the weekends and my dad and I would sit and listen. He would fill in the gaps and tell me how his family would sit around the radio and listen to Fibber Magee and Molly, Amos and Andy, The Lone Ranger, The Shadow, Mystery Theater, and others. I was hooked. Not only did I want to hear them because my dad loved them, but my young imagination seemed to grow while I listened.

My dad and I would listen and he would point out sounds in the background to help me “see” what was happening. He would ask me about the story afterwards and we would talk about what I had seen in my mind while I listened. The combination of a love of stories and a love of writing meant that I entered kindergarten already able to write not only letters, but simple words as well. From there I never looked back. By fourth grade I was reading near high school level and by sixth I was reading at a 12.0 grade level (the highest the test ran to).

I read everything I could get my hands on and actually asked for a dictionary as a Christmas present in the fifth grade. I made up stories constantly. Acting them out with my brother or friends and narrating as we went along. The first time I tried to write a make-believe story myself was in the sixth grade (I still have it). Seeing it written down and stapled like a book awoke in me the desire to, one day, actually have a book of my own written and published.

That dream has awoken and slumbered in cycles ever since….

(more to come………)