Inspiration,  Memoir

My Story of Stories

March 28, 2020 /

The first time I read a book completely by myself I was 5 years old. I still vividly remember sitting on the couch of my oldest sister’s house, reading Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Suess to her. Pride filled me when I finished–I had done it! By myself! Rushing into the kitchen I told my parents. 

Laughing, they congratulated me. “Are you sure you read it? Or did you just have it memorized from making your sister read it to you a thousand times.” 

 

I was deeply offended by this accusation that I had ‘cheated’ in reading a book by myself for the very first time–with all the dignity of my five years I insisted that it was not so. I had read every word.

When I went into the classroom, my love for books grew exponentially every year. I inhaled the Critter stories, the Berenstain Bears’ family adventures, Amelia Bedelia’s hilarious mishaps. Passing quickly through the short chapter books, I delved into the depths of the library–into the shadowed recesses containing thicker volumes. I held them reverently, knowing that in my hands I held a completely different world, a different life than my own. One I could experience with the simple turning of a page. 

As I continued to read I developed preferences. I liked stories with dragons and unicorns, magic and sword fights. Each story left traces of their magic, shaping my mind subtly and gently, helping me become the person I was meant to be. Into the Land of the Unicorns I travelled, falling a little bit in love for the first time with the strong unicorn prince within those pages. I discovered Tamora Pierce and her fierce lioness. I read the covers off my copies, revelling in the courage of a girl who decided that the limitations enforced on her by virtue of her gender were more like guidelines. As she carved her own place in a world that wasn’t ready for her, she sparked an idea, the glimmer of something true, inside my heart.

Then, I tumbled into Hogwarts. I learned about the nature of good and evil, the importance of friendship, and the truth about magic within the inked labyrinth of its pages. I watched as a girl with bushy hair and big teeth, who always stuck her hand in the air and didn’t really know how to talk to boys, became liked, respected, envied, and eventually essential. 

 

I discovered heroines who were angry and vengeful. Women who wore pants and swung swords when they were expected to wear dresses and wave fans. Some who were too beautiful to be taken seriously, others too plain to be noticed at all. Girls who saved the world or doomed it, who fell in love or eschewed love all together. I discovered the delicious taste of endless possibility. 

And I needed it. 

 

Eventually, the cumulative effect of this reading (rather like the fevered brain the Victorians were so worried about) was another addiction. I learned how to craft my own stories. 

At first, I just wanted to fix the heroines of the shows I loved who just weren’t quite right. Or add a character who embodied who I wanted to be. My heroines had power, sarcasm, and always knew the right things to say. And boys loved her. Obviously. 

 

When I entered middle school and the school yard factions began shifting, I found a group of friends who loved creating their own stories. We began writing together, sitting on the swing sets, throwing ideas back and forth, putting out characters into the same world, same novel. I would like to say I handled this with balance and fair-mindedness, but my vague memories of this time leave me with the impression that I might have hogged the story. Apologies to my playground friends. Through this time, those composition and spiral bound notebooks began filling up with story after story. I got tired of the limits of other peoples worlds and began creating my own. I explored fantasy, crime fiction, mystery, science fantasy. Onto those wide lined pages I poured all the angst and sarcasm that my hormone-addled mind could conjur. I processed heartbreak and loneliness, allowed my characters to experience and triumph over the challenges I could not seem to conquer myself.

 

My parents bought me a computer for school work. Some homework got done on it, but more time was spent filling word documents with dialogue that I cackled over and my first attempts at drawing dragons in Paint. The words flowed. 

 

And then, I stopped. 

I lost faith in my ability to get those worlds, those stories, those heroines from my whirling mind onto the page. This happened around 15 I think. I try to remember the events, memories, sensations of the time when I gave up, but I can only remember a couple things. One was the discouragement of someone who told me at 14 years of age that my writing was derivative and lacked value because it featured a feminist approach to world-building and heroism. My stories lacked the skill and seriousness of other genres, but it might garner attention if only because such plain trend-following would appeal to the ignorant masses. 

The other was that as I wrote, as I learned more both inside and outside of the classroom, I discovered something: I was not a very good writer. Or at least, that’s what I thought. 

 

Now, anyone seeing a 15 year old give up because they weren’t ‘good enough’ at something would tell them they have the rest of their lives ahead of them to get better. But I believed at that time that if I was not immediately great at something, it probably wasn’t my thing. If I wasn’t a prodigy at it, the task was not worth doing because I would never go anywhere with it. Only the exceptional, the extraordinary, succeed in fields like writing, music, art. 

 

Luckily time has a way of coaching us out of our misconceptions. This process is often painful and drawn out, but can be valuable. 

 

The stories lived on inside my head. I had been telling myself stories to fall asleep since I was old enough to drive my mother crazy asking for water before bed, complaining about my pillow stuffing, and telling her that I could not fall asleep because my heart was beating too hard. The habit of imagining other worlds, or living inside them in the backseat of the car or in that particularly boring math class, was so ingrained I couldn’t stop it even if I wanted to. 

And a decade or so went by. I pursued a new dream, went to college, fell in love, got married. The stories accompanied me, changing in world, tone, character, magic. But the heroines that I had crafted and needed in those early years would pop up now and again. And when I failed at my second dream, when I examined the possibility that I would live a life of mediocrity, without grand purpose, I paused. I looked back. 

 

If I were going to be stuck in a job that could not bring me joy, I would have to find it elsewhere. 

 

 

But what did joy in what I do even look like? Where did I start? The vision I had of myself in a moment of pure joy, when I felt the most freedom and purest sense of self, looked like this:

A girl with crazy curls sticking out all over, sitting in a computer chair kicking her feet, hand on mouth as she rereads what she just typed, suddenly bursts into laughter. Head thrown back. Cackling. Incandescent joy.  

There I was. There I am. And there I could probably be again. 

 

So I played with the idea of writing again. For fun. If it was for fun, then if it was bad it wouldn’t matter. But I wanted to be good. I wanted to learn to be better. It would probably take the rest of my life. But I had time on my hands. 

 

And the stories, the heroines, had always been there. 

 

I began putting words on the page. Crafting worlds and imagining cities and climates and cultures. I came alive again on the pages where I poured out the magic in my mind. It was not yet good. But I wasn’t going to give up on it this time. 

 

Five years later, I haven’t. I’m still learning. I’m not yet where I want to be. But I am better than where I was. The next step is to share the worlds, the stories, and the heroines. Because maybe, just maybe, if I need these women–angry, sneaky, good with swords or with words, beautiful or plain, intelligent, kind, anxious or fearless, flawed, complicated–there are girls out there who need them too. 

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