What Does Writing Mean To Me?

A celebration of childhood. "Never forget your childhood innocence, it's the most important thing," my favorite quote from a movie about the author Frances Mayes. Childhood exudes imagination. Days filled with imaginary friends sharing a cup of tea in bright pink plastic tea cups, giggling into their palm as you whisper a secret in their ear, or standing beside you as you battle swashbuckling pirates, fire-breathing dragons and cackling witches.
Writing fiction is playing make-believe in its ultimate form. And for me, feels like one of those days snuggling in a big overstuffed chair in front of the fireplace at my granddaddy's house. The heat of the orange coals warming my cheeks as I imagined a small city collapsing and sizzling into ash.
I was a story-teller to silent ears, being an only child at the time, and my granddaddy's farm was my stage. Isolated and alone, yet nudged by the characters in my mind into far away worlds as the adults around me (mama, daddy, granddaddy and gramma) cooked, worked and repeated like an endless assembly line. More often than not, they scurried me through the back door. Go play, and I did. From the moment the screen door slammed against the door frame behind me, I felt the nudge. Seems every day a new character would grab me by the hand and pull me out into the pine trees, where their towering trunks transformed into castle turrets or morphed into a fairy-tale landscape. Oddly, I never thought to take up a pen during all those tender years; my words merely floating on the wind like some wandering troubadour.
Then one day, I discovered something. Sitting cross-legged behind a wall of books separating the hallway from the dining room, I wiggled out two large volumes: a book on English Literature and "The Complete Works of Shakespeare." I brushed my fingers over the top of the opening pages, across the faded handwritten letters of my gramma's name penned in the corner. And then it began, the slow page-turning, the pausing to read a few lines from Beowulf, the sonnets of Shakespeare, the poetry of Dryden and the prose of Milton. How can I describe the moment as the black words leapt off those yellowed pages? A little eleven-year-old girl lost and found at the same instance. When I left the house that day, my gramma came up behind me, tapped me on the shoulder and wrapped my hands around those books. She said nothing, just gave me a smile as if to say, "I know, I understand." And she did, she knew.
It wasn't until my junior year in high school that my English Lit teacher looked me in the eye and said, "You need to write." I didn't know how she knew either, but she did, just like gramma. Those first stories I set to paper held such excitement for me, like hearing the clicking of the rollercoaster as your little car heads up the first hill, your eyes on the clouds, your heart beating fast, your knuckles white as you clutch the pen, holding your breath as your story plunges, dips, swirls and loops.
When I think back to those early beginnings, I smile. They were inklings of my true self, my inner being; innocent and unskilled words reflecting a pure and unscathed youth. John Earle, a noted author during the Restoration, said of a child, "His soul is yet a white paper unscrambled with observations of the world, where-with at length becomes a blurred notebook." Apropos to how I feel about those innocent days of writing.
Yet, life happens, spilling out a blot of ink across those white pages, pulling a person further away from those childish imaginings. I opted for a nine-to-five job, marriage and children after high school, completely unaware of what writing truly meant to me, even giving it up entire for a while. My child sat brooding and scolded as if I had lashed her backside and locked her in a dark room. I felt her through the years, that empty space, that hollow heart, and I was never quite able to pinpoint the reason for my spiralling emptiness. You can only keep that true self pinned up for so long until she begins wailing and beating the walls, begging to be unlocked. So many times through the years I swallowed her down because of pressing responsibilities.
And then it came, the vomiting. The days that either 'make you or fordoes you quite.' During those unsettling days of trying to hone in on the reason for my heart feeling like an abandoned thing on the edge of an oubliette, I took up a pen.
The journey since those days, the past fifteen years, have been an awakening of that child. Now, writing and story-telling has brought me full circle to that little girl playing among the pine trees. There is not a day that goes by, when I snuggle down in my big comfy chair and open my laptop, that I do not greet her. She is happy now with the sun glinting across her eager blue eyes and knowing smile, as if she is saying,"If only you had of asked. If only you hadn't sent me away for a while. I would have told you what writing means to me."
Now I am older and my notebook is quite blurred. There are so many lines and quotes that I come across in my reading that I pause and smile, knowing exactly what that writer meant, for I can now see the children in other writers. Like, did Shakespeare wander aimlessly down the banks of the Avon dreaming of the battle of Agincourt? Did the Bronte sisters peruse the dark moors and then act out the scenes in a candlelit attic room? I like to think so, for in that feeling it brings a cosy feeling to writing, a kinship, a thread woven through the blanket of all prose and poetry.
Now I know what it was that my gramma and English teacher knew. They saw it, that dangling thread waiting to be clipped off or looped into the weave. I am so thankful they tucked me back into the stitching because now when I sit down to write I have a thick quilt to keep me warm, a patchwork of imaginary characters, far off worlds and rich deep words. What does writing mean to me? Happiness. Completeness. Warmth.
The pure imaginings of childhood refined in the fire of time, experience, hard work and many sleepless nights. Each story my own child, my baby, that I coax to walk and talk until I can send her out into the world. Every story resembling me, once scared and alone, growing, changing, painfully reaching the moment of ultimate revision, and emerging into something worthy.
Only then are you free to let someone else curl up next to you at the fire, snuggle close beneath your blanket, open the pages for a good satisfying read.