Slapdash Biography

My first memory of reading was my mother reading to me before bedtime. We were sitting on my twin bed which was covered in a blue chenille bedspread. The overhead light was on and my mother’s hip touched mine as she read. Her brown hair hung in soft curls around her cheeks and her blue eyes followed the words of the book like a typewriter carriage.

As soon as I could read, I snuck away from my raucous large family to find a spot where it was quiet and where nobody would find me until my reading was done. My favorite stories were fairy tales with happy endings. I liked it when Cinderella married the prince, Sleeping Beauty was awakened with a kiss, and Hansel and Grettel pushed the witch into the oven, stuffed their pockets with precious stones from her cottage, and found their way back to their loving father. In my bookshelf, I still have two of those books of fairy tales with broken spines and frayed covers; I read them from cover to cover over and over.

When I was nine, I wrote my first poem. It was an impression of the first time that I saw my reflection in a pond. That poem revealed my deep nature. I loved to think about growing, impressions, beauty, and spirituality. I continued writing poetry through high school, college, and at lunch time when I started my first career, which wasn’t writing. I was an accountant with a hidden passion to write.

No matter what I did during my day job, I continued writing poetry and eventually started writing short stories. After I left accounting, I tried journalism for two years and finally found my way back to fiction and my deep thoughts.

My writing journey has been long. I inherited the writing gene from my father, but the road I took to become a competent writer took decades. As a teen, I overused adjectives and created syrupy-sweet descriptions. As an accountant, I learned how to get the facts and get to the point. As a short-story writer, I learned that the character had to be the center of a story.

Finally, I went back to college and got a degree in Early Modern Literature and Composition. Early Modern Lit includes the poetry of Sir Philip Sidney; the stories of Edmund Spenser; and the plays and sonnets of Shakespeare. As background knowledge for these authors, I studied Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Boccaccio. In my opinion, a student could study these authors her whole life and still not stop learning.

Still, my writing wasn’t ready. I had no plot for a novel and no verifiable income coming in from what I wrote, so I took a job teaching English in college. What a great tool for learning, teaching is. I learned not only how to teach students how to write a great essay, but I practiced writing great examples. I gleaned how to analyze poetry for theme, symbols, word choice, and figures of speech. I studied how to discuss novels for character development and plot development.

When I retired, I decided I was ready to write. I didn’t need to make money from it. I had certainly written over 10,000 times in my lifetime by then, so I was as expert as I ever would be. I had the time, the discipline, and the courage.

So here I am writing my biography. You see, I’ve written the first draft of a novel, but I now have to tear it apart and put it back together. It’s not publishable like this biography will be in a few minutes.

Each day that I post an article or story on my blog, I consider a productive day that I can share with the world. I can’t share my productive novel days yet, so this keeps me going in the meantime.

What else should I share about myself in my biography? That I have nine brothers and sisters, forty-four first cousins, and a charitable organization of eighty female friends? That my favorite color is pink and my least favorite food is cooked carrots? That I love to cook and hate to fold clothes? That I exercise daily except those days when I sip coffee on the couch until 10:00 a.m. thinking about writing?

These are interesting tidbits to be sure, but I hope that my fiction writing is more fascinating and thought-provoking. After all, its fiction, not reality. Stay tuned.