If Only I Had Known…
If only I’d known that writing every day, or at least with some regularity was all I needed to get started as a writer. All that plotting and planning and reading and thinking… without taking much action took me further into the abyss.
If only I’d known what my writing could have led to, I would have released my characters and story ideas for the world to see, and learn by doing instead of overthinking and judging myself so harshly.
But now that I do know, there is no stopping me. Everything I think about and experience has great potential to become a story, and I’m making up for lost time by writing for several hours every day.
And when I’m not writing, I am encouraging others to get their stories written down and saved for posterity, so they won’t die with a story still inside of them. This is from a quote by the late Dan Poynter. He was someone I first met in person over a decade ago, when we discovered we both lived part-time in Santa Barbara.
Humble Beginnings As a Writer
I’d written poetry as a child of five or six. I received my first library card when I was four and that was because I could print my first name legibly, not because I could read more than a few words. This led to my mother and I visiting the library at least twice each week and the children’s librarian asking me to enter their poetry contest with a poem of my own.
In the fourth grade, my best friend was a boy named Mark Lucas. He was an interesting person in that he preferred to stay inside at recess and work on his latest story rather than to play dodgeball or talk to the other kids. Hearing him describe the story he was currently writing was enough to turn me into his most loyal fan.
He would give me story ideas and tell me that he would read the stories when I had finished. It was more difficult than I thought, but I wasn’t about to give up.
Writing these short stories was like taking a vacation inside of my brain. While I brainstormed the ideas that Mark’s prompts brought to the surface for me, it was as if I could see the colors of the words and hear the characters speaking the words I gave them.
Mark went on to become a professional writer. We are still friends and he celebrates all of my success with the books I write. I thank him profusely on a regular basis, for it’s only another writer who can truly understand what our stories mean to us.
I’m bestselling Wall Street Journal and USA Today author Connie Ragen Green, knowing that I am blessed to have finally discovered writing and realizing that if I had only known about the possibilities of finding your
purpose early in life, my life’s journey what have been a very different one. But I wouldn’t trade anything
for my journey now.
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