Self-Taught Writer

When I was five years old, I spelled my first word. Back then, it was rare that kids went to Kindergarten (no heckles, please, from the lugnut gallery), so I learned about letters and sounds on my own. I was pretty proud of myself when I took my carefully crayoned word in to my father, who was doing his business on the toilet.

Unfazed at my interruption, he said, “That’s great! Do you know what it spells?”

I did not, but I tried to guess.

He said, “G.A.S. That spells gas.”

The irony of that moment did not occur to me until just now. (Anyone who read my post, Canning the Muse, can now make a quirky historical connection.) That aside, GAS was the first word I recognized, and I got a lot of mileage out of it. I remembered the letters’ names and the sounds they made from that one encounter, and from that point came up with many more words.

By the time I entered first grade, I was ahead of most other kids; and within a year, I was writing stories. My first one, scrawled neatly on a yellow-lined tablet while sitting at my grandfather’s desk, was about boy and girl pigs that could fly. I dare say that this story probably spawned the saying, “when pigs fly.” (My mother still has the original, so I can, er, prove my claim for good money — like, really good money.)

So early on, I was a self-taught writer. All through school, I excelled at whatever writing project they gave me. But it wasn’t until after I was out of school and in the throes of building a family that I dabbled in serious fiction, and probably another ten years before I decided that writing was my true calling. Short stories weren’t really what I was after either. I wanted to pen novels. I’ve penned three total.

The first novel sleeps in a thick, black, three-ring binder, the original hand-typed paper (Elite type Roman Gothic, on a circa 1980-ish IBM Selectric typewriter) long since browned and dusty with age. Oh, you should have seen it in its prime — five hundred pages of lovingly crafted crap. But I cherished my characters and their story – all four complicated, convoluted, clichéd plots. During those five years of having babies and holding a full-time job, I stole an hour here and there and indulged my muse. This massive undertaking was more like a cultural immersion, and I learned much more than characterization, plot, story arc, dialogue, tension, and narrative. I learned that if I kept at it, I could finish it. I could actually write an entire novel. I was a writer. Published or not, magical prose or dull drivel, I was on a journey that would last a lifetime.

What the hell was I thinking?

©2008 K. Jayne Cockrill

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