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Word of the day? STORY

I hear fake people.

There. I said it. It all started with my imaginary friend, Tina. She lived behind the chair in our living room when I was a preschooler. When we weren’t hanging out, I was enamored with the books on our shelves and passed many an hour on my grandmother’s lap while she read to me. Once I learned to read, I became a voracious reader. While I left Tina behind (sorry, girl) and progressed to hanging out with actual people, I never lost my love for a good story.

But I ignored my desire to become a real-life story teller.

As in one who earns dollars in exchange for her craft. I talked myself out of creative writing and pursued a more ‘responsible’ major in college. While my first job was challenging in many ways, it’s how I realized that everybody has a story. As the cliche goes, truth is stranger than fiction.

Marriage, motherhood and surviving the toddler years suppressed my desire to write down the story developing in my head. In fact, the opening paragraph of my manuscript languished on my computer for seven years before I started adding to it.

Eventually, the desire to breathe life into the characters that lived inside my head became almost overwhelming. Theirs was a story that needed to be told. So I sat down and wrote 70,000 words. It took much longer than I thought it would. I ranted and railed against becoming a story teller. It’s hard. It’s lonely. I feel like a weirdo. But in my heart I know  somebody, somewhere, hopefully lots of somebodies, needs to read this story. I hear it said quite often by accomplished writers that they write the book they would want to read. So that’s what I did.

While the pursuit of publication is like the craziest, longest roller-coaster ride ever, I’m going to hang in there. I don’t know when my dream will come true, but I know I’m not giving up. Because I never lost my love for a good story.