For me (Nicole), here is a slightly longer version of my answer:
My writing influence stemmed from desperation and the love of a good friend. Thanks to a series emotionally blindsiding tragedies, I found myself needing to retreat and process what was happening around me. My abused friends enjoyed the brunt of my venting via email and instant message, and one valuable friend in particular changed my life when he complimented my writing and told me I should be a writer. That was the first time I'd ever considered becoming a writer. He encouraged me to take writing classes at a local university extension program. At that point, not only had I never been exposed to writing classes, I didn't even know they'd existed. When we parked in the campus parking structure, and got out of the car, I had what I now understand was a panic attack. I'd had negative scholastic experiences and just being on a campus elicted a great deal of anxiety. Still does, actually. He took my hand anyway and walked me there, steadfastly reassuring me that it would be okay. He was right. It was. If he hadn't been the Gayle to my Oprah, I wouldn't be a writer today. Thanks Geo!
4 comments:
I think for me it was C.S. Lewis or maybe it was E.B. White or maybe later it was ee cummings. I do know that my love of reading and the "Book Mobile" and perusing the "Weekly Reader" trying to find just the perfect one book I was allowed to purchase once a month as a kid was key to being fascinated with telling my story or a story, any story.
When I was 13, a teacher told me that my poetry was good and even after we moved away we would come back to visit friends and relatives and that teacher would sit down with me and go over my writing. Thank you Cheryl Gratton for being incredibly generous and patient with a 14, 15, & 16 year old's angst.
Hi, I'm Kirby Timmons, moderator for the Santa Clarita Valley group.
I was first encouraged in my writing by Mrs. Lange, a college english teacher at a small university outside of Atlanta. I had written a first-person remembrance about a vacation to visit a favorite uncle many years ago. Writing that story had started as the usual college freshman assignment. But, in the course of writing, it turned out to be a very personal experience for me, recalling a man who was basically a kind of "rock star" to me and my sister and brothers when we would visit his farm in South Carolina each summer. But to have my expression validated by this very supportive english teacher changed me in some fundamental way. I looked upon my thoughts and expressions as having value in a way I had not previously.
I think all writers come by it differently, but for many of us there's that one long-ago paper, thesis, term paper, whatever -- the one that we saved. Buried in our desk drawer, bottom of the closet, the one that survives multiple spring cleanings. And we can't throw it away because that written work connects us with something deep in ourselves that we know better than to undervalue. And so we save it.
I dragged that story out a decade later and used it as the basis for a treatment for THE WALTONS television series. How I got it to the producers and secured my first tv writing assignment is a longer story. Bottom line is, I didn't know I couldn't. I often wonder if I would have even saved that paper if Mrs. Letitia Lange, English 101, hadn't taken the time to offer that word or encouragement. Probably not. And then my life would have been a different story altogether. But someone else would have had to write it. Because without Mrs. Lange, I would not have been a writer.
Kirby Timmons, Moderator, Santa Clarita Group
Hey, this is Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum, moderator for the mid-Wilshire/Koreatown/West LA group.
What got me writing as a kid was life and having books all around me.
My family had such a ridiculous amount of books in our house when I was a kid that at one point I went room to room making a tally. I have no idea how high the number went, but I have a distinct visual memory of several sheets of yellow notepaper full of tally marks. I also remember working out a system in which every fifth tally mark went across the previous four, which made the end count much easier. I felt pretty good about that until my older sister told me that was the way everyone was taught how to do it. Then I remember wondering how I’d never been taught that before and how I’d managed to come up with it on my own.
I also had an unusually rich life for a white kid from a highly educated and functional family. I grew up in a rough, working class, mixed race neighborhood five miles from downtown Nashville. My dad was a professor and my mother a school teacher, but we were still poor, and my father loved to build thing and to show me how to live in the world. My childhood is full of crazy stories about building tree houses, exploring storm drains, leaping into abandoned quarries, fist fights, stealing car stereos (not my dad’s idea), and so on...
So, with these things combined, I've always written...not so much as a way to work out what was going on or as an escape my life but to make USE of what I was experiencing... to take the hard things that were occurring around me and make them less hard by making them into art, into something that could be preserved and held in high regard in someone’s living room.
It sort of worked/works. It sort of didn’t/doesn't. I guess that's why I keep trying...because of the continual failure rather than the rare success...
...that day is often thought about Nikki
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