Writing Journal: Origins

Today is the ORIGINS blogfest -- where everyone who has signed up gives the story of their origin as a writer.  This is mine...

In preparation for this blog post, I spent a huge chunk of time Saturday and Sunday looking for something that I wanted to scan in and include in this post.  However, after searching all the likely locations, and many of the unlikely ones, I did not find it.  It was frustrating too, because I had just run across it not that long ago.

It was an old wrinkled two-page story, typed on a manual typewriter in early 1972, with the less-than-entirely-original title, "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms."   It was the first real "story" I ever wrote, and I thought showing it -- with the misspellings and x'd out sections and misunderstanding of geography (the deepest point in the oceans is the Marianas Trench at actually just under 6,000 fathoms) of the 11-year-old boy who wrote it -- would be a great way to present my writing origin.

Instead -- because I could not find it -- you just get me telling you about it.  Not quite as fun, but the point is the same:  

 My writing "origin" goes back a long way.

I've always loved reading, and as an only child, I developed an imagination and the ability to make up my own fun, and so story-telling became a natural outlet.  There is no clear point where I suddenly turned into someone who wanted to write, but the process started a long time ago, and I think culminated in that first typewritten "real" story. 

Probably my biggest regret is that I didn't stick with writing more as I grew older.  In my early teens, I started drawing, and that took away from my writing  Then I started playing guitar, and that pretty much swallowed everything else and became my major creative outlet.  I played for hours and hours a day -- hunkered in my room, practicing scales, studying books, and playing along with records.  Then I joined some bands and spent most of my early twenties playing my guitar.  I still read, and I still imagined stories I might like to create, but playing music was the focus.

I took some creative writing courses during my early college years and really enjoyed them -- and I did the writing needed for that.  But again -- music and guitar pretty much swallowed up everything else.

Then in my later twenties I went back to school and got my engineering degree, and worked, and got swept up in life and relationships and career. 

It wasn't until 2008 that life settled down enough for an idea to pop up:  "I want to write a novel."  And since that time, I've on-and-off been developing as a writer.  I shelved my first early novel attempt and have been working on another since 2010, and it's gone through several revisions. But since 2008, "being a writer" has been a central goal.  So, in many ways, my Origin story really begins just a few short years ago.

But truthfully, it began in 1972, with an eleven-year-old boy clinking away on the old typewriter his grandfather had given him, creating a story of how a deep-sea monster destroyed a town.