Writing

I first began writing many years ago when I was a teenager, poetry and little stories mostly, but it wasn’t until I wrote my first novel during my sophomore and junior years in college that I realized how much of a charge writing really gave me.  It wasn’t just the challenge of communicating in the clearest way possible, of finding just those absolutely perfect words to get across what I saw and felt and imagined in my head; nor was it (entirely) the sense of satisfaction I experienced as I watched my characters take on lives of their own and think and speak and move about, seemingly independent of my intentions that they do so; and I can’t say that it was only because of the way that I was able to go so deeply into my own consciousness that I lost all sense of time and space, that made the immediacy of writing unlike any other activity I knew.  Rather, it was all of those things, and more, something unexplainable.  Something that I find ironically always stays several steps ahead of my ability to describe.

Inevitably perhaps, after I completed the first novel and revised it so many times that I lost count, all the while sending it out to literary agents and either receiving no responses or, worse, rejections, I found that the well of creativity was becoming increasingly dryer.  Finally I reached the point where there was nothing left, so I gave up writing altogether.  Except for the occasional note in a birthday card to a relative or friend, I didn’t write another word for twenty years.

And then quite unexpectedly at the beginning of 1992 the old urge to get in touch with my inner life and put on paper the themes and images contained therein reawakened, quietly insistent at first then in a voice of increasing intensity.  It was at that point, after several trips to the library on research missions, that I sat down at the word processor and started writing what would become An Army of Angels, a fictionalized account of the life of Joan of Arc.  And this time I did acquire literary representation; I did become published.

I’ve written several pieces of fiction since that time, some of it to my satisfaction and some not, but the point is that I continue to write.  Not every day as you’re “supposed” to do if you are a writer, but when the impulse comes upon me and I hear the Muse whisper in my ear so compellingly that I cannot resist the need to write.  To create. 

It’s just who I am.