Today one of my blog posts (Knocking on the Wrong Door) is being featured on All Groan Up. Check it out here (or don’t—it’s a free country).
BUT IF YOU DON’T I’LL NEVER EVER EVER TALK TO YOU EVER AGAIN <8[
Wait, what? No, that’s not true. I’ll still talk to you. Sorry about that, kids.
I’ll stop talking now.
Carry on.
I’ll write you a picture with my palette of words
I’ll mix and I’ll mingle the nouns and the verbs.
I’ll paint you a story with my writer’s pen
A blank canvas of imagination has no beginning or end.
I’ll show you the world in colorful letters
I’ll write you a picture with commas and feathers.
A dash of whimsy, a touch of black ink,
A stroke of gray graphite mixed up with a wink.
All the colors of dreams painted with verbs
My pen is the paintbrush, my paint is the words.
Of pink paper poppy and flight of black bird
I’ll paint you a story you’ve never quite heard.
…
Thanks to the ever amazing husband for drawing the picture. He really does put up with a lot around here you know :]
I had a lot of trouble learning how to read when I was a kid. I don’t remember how old I was when I finally put the words together, I just remember being the very last kid who could make her way through the jungle of words in a book. None of it made sense to me. I couldn’t grasp how the letters and sounds were supposed to come together and actually mean something. I thought I was stupid and really believed there was something wrong with me. I believed I would never be smart like other people. I hated reading. I hated books. I hated words. I couldn’t spell. I couldn’t even pronounce words correctly. I avoided books and reading because they reminded me of how stupid I thought I was and brought to my attention everything I wasn’t good at.
I was a physical kid—always outside climbing trees and building forts with my brothers. I didn’t want to sit still and learn anything. I believed I couldn’t learn and that I wasn’t smart enough to understand like other people.
But then when I was 11 I picked up a book called The Penny Whistle by B. J. Hoff and something changed inside of me. I have no idea why I picked that book up or cracked it open because it wasn’t something I normally did. I remember loving the illustrations in the book—crisp, detailed pencil drawings that looked like you could touch the page and get graphite on your fingers; perhaps that’s what drew me in. Regardless, it was the words that kept me. Finally, for the first time in my life, words made sense; they ran off the page like water and I drank them up—consumed them one by one to the very last page.
I pulled The Penny Whistle off my bookshelf today—it’s tattered with a piece of tape on the cover. My name is written in black marker on the inside cover with the date July 18, 1997. I flipped through the pages and found the grubby fingerprints off an 11-year-old throughout. The book falls open to my favorite illustration of a tree standing stark against a winter backdrop.
When I held that book today I actually had to stop and take a deep breath to fight back tears. Why? Because that simple little book changed my life. I don’t even remember what the book is really about; the story is lost but the change it brought inside of me remains. When I poured over that book as an 11-year-old girl, I found something inside of myself. I found words. I found ability and intelligence. I found stories. I came alive and knew I had value, capability, and something to share. I went from hating books to loving them—loving the stories held inside two covers. I fell in love with words and began to see them as colors on a palette and the blank page as my canvas. There, reading that book, I fell in love with writing.
When I was a teenager, I remember being sick and bored one day so I cracked open Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster. The name Daddy-Long-Legs amused me and, for no other reason, I started reading. I read the whole book that day without ever putting it down. I’m not an avid reader even now so it means something when I can’t part with a story until it’s finished. I gobbled up each book by Webster and learned one important thing from her stories—the writer’s voice. I don’t know how to describe Jean Webster—her imagination, her childishness, her sharp sense of humor—she wrote like she was having a witty conversation with each of her readers. I fell in love with her style and find now that my own voice in writing grew out of the whimsy I so love in her books.
Even though I struggled through school and language has always been a challenge for me, I have found that reading is the best lesson I ever learned in writing. In reading, I actually see the way language is laid out on a page in sentences and paragraphs. Instead of just hearing about and practicing the proper construction of individual sentences and parts of speech, I can actually visualize and grasp sentence structure as I read. The more I read, the more I learn about writing. The more I write, the more I want to read and learn more and more from the words and characters acting out the world of grammar on the page. I may never be a very good student. I may never be able to fully understand the complexities of the English language. But I do know the more I read the words of good writers, the better writer I too can be.
“The problem was too big for the lot of them. But her mother always maintained that you had to start where you were or you’d never get anywhere at all” (p. 37, The Penny Whistle).
Today is my baby blog’s first birthday! I can’t believe my baby is growing up :]
It was a slow-going endeavor when I first started blogging. I had but a handful of readers (mostly related to me) and in those early days, one of my first thoughts in writing was always, “how can I get more readers?” Even then, I didn’t write just to be read; I write because I love doing so. I love words and the click, click, click of the words as they’re typed into existence.
Still, even though I love writing just for the pleasure of the words themselves, I would be lying if I said I didn’t care about having readers. If I wanted to write only for myself, I would journal not blog. I blog to share what I love with other people but to do that, well dang it, you need readers! So plan and connive I did and slowly, ever so slowly, the readers came. But then, once I had bright eyes watching for my words, I panicked a little bit. I thought about all the different interests and backgrounds of all the different people reading and drove myself crazy trying to decide what I could possibly write that would interest so many lovely people. Let me tell you what I’ve learned in this first year:
It’s been a great first year, kids :] How about you? How do you manage to be yourself even when others are watching and reading your words?
I was kind of cynical about starting a blog back in the day but I’m glad I did—here’s why:
That is a list of 7 things not 10. I never promised 10 you know and I don’t know why 10 is supposed to be the perfect number anyway; I’ve always preferred 7 :]
So, why do you blog? What have you learned from putting your thought out there for the whole world to read? If you don’t blog, why not?
“We read to know that we are not alone.” C.S. Lewis
Outside Air 