The following is the result of a lightly-edited writing prompt from a recent "Let Us Out" Meeting:
I’ve always written. I don’t remember not writing.
I always had a journal, and I know I was writing stories to entertain myself by the time I was in high school. I remember writing a teen romance that was about ten pages long. I showed it to my best friend at the time to see what she thought. Admittedly, the heroine was based loosely on me, but it wasn’t intended to be me. In the story the heroine had a beautiful smile, and when she finished the story the first thing my friend said was: “you think your smile is contagious?” and then she went on to say that the piece just showed how full of myself I was. I stopped showing people my short stories after that.
Then I met my husband about ten years later, and I started writing things to entertain him and some of our friends. He told me I was good, and slowly I let myself believe it. And now I’m writing because I’ve lost so many years of story-telling just because some jealous bitch told me I was self-centered (I was, but to hell with her), and I’m not going to waste any more time.
But mostly I write because I keep making up stories and I want to tell them. There isn’t a week that goes by where I’m not scribbling ideas on a scrap of paper on my nightstand. I can’t stand to think how many awesome ideas I’ve lost by just saying “I’ll remember that in the morning” and then I don’t.
