Ever since I can remember I've always been in love with words. I like the way certain words sound, the way some words have more than one meaning or even the interesting things you can do with words whether on paper or by simply speaking.
My very first foray into the auctorial arts began at the age of ten. My one page epic was based on a movie I had seen called INVASION OF THE SAUCER MEN which concerned an invasion of earth by bugeyed,bulbous headed space aliens. All I did was simply change the alien to devils and my love of writing was off and running from that point on. I wrote everything from ten page movie scripts, poems, songs(some good,others fair to bursting with crappiness)and I even attempted to write a novel at the ripe old age of seventeen.Upon reading my effort years later, I was so aghast at it's awfulness that I promptly deposited my so called novel into the trash to insure that no one else would ever read it either. Trust me, it was that bad.
During my high school years my English teacher, Sister Joan, encouraged my writing by reading and then critiquing my short stories. My admiration for her was such that whenever she would compliment my latest endeavor, I felt as if I had been knighted. One of my wishes is that one day I can contact Sister Joan to let her know what a positive influence she was in my life.
Like every other writer, there comes that day when you get an epiphany that tells you perhaps God put you on this earth to write. My personal epiphany came to me as a result of a biology report I had to do. Okay, I know what some of you are thinking as you scratch your heads in bewilderment," What does a biology report have to do with him realizing his desire to become a writer?" Well, here goes: I hated biology. It was a subject I considered to be both dreary and boring. I knew that after I graduated high school that I would never in a million years apply any of the information in this class to my every day life. The only reason I took the course in the first place was to fulfill my college prep course requirements. Otherwise, I would have taken a more exciting course such as pottery making or glass blowing.
Even an event as the frog dissection (much anticipated by the other students, but not by me)could get me excited about biology. In fact, I found the entire procedure to be so distasteful that I made it a point to deliberately miss the school bus that morning. The way I looked at it was, the poor little bugger never gave me as much as a minutes trouble and yet I was going to cut him into pieces, then throw it's remains into a trash bag. I just didn't wanna do it.
However, I did indulge in a bit of topical seventies humor: there was a mimeographed drawing of a frog along with an explanation of the dissection which was given to the entire class. I cut out the drawing and tacked it up on the bulletin board with a word balloon reading," Tomorrow I will be killed by the government because I know too much." Oh well,it was considered funny back then.
The upshot is, that one of my fellow classmates and his Mom saw me walking to school and offered me a ride. So, I got to dissect the frog after all much to my disgust. So much for dodging the proverbial bullet.
One day the biology teacher announced to the class that as an assignment we had to put together an elaborate project that would account for a major portion of our grade. It could either be an individual project or a group could tackle the assignment but the deadline for this massive undertaking was in three months. I decided to go solo on this one and promptly placed the project on the back burner. Or in other words, I pretty much forgot about it. Did I hate biology or what?
In any event, it was the night before the assignment had to be handed in that I decided to get cracking and hit the panic button wondering what I was going to hand in to the teacher on Monday morning. I had to do some quick thinking. Out of sheer desperation an idea came to me about doing a report about the dangers of pollution.
Burning the midnight oil,I scoured the house for any magazine I could find that had pictures of smoke stacks emitting black,toxic smoke, cars spewing exhaust fumes; any photos I could scrounge up that dipicted pollution. I pasted the pictures onto sheets of construction paper using copious amounts of Elmer's glue which constituted the visual part of my report. I then wrote an off the cuff account of how pollution was an impending danger to the human race. There were no facts or research employed for my assignment,I just wrote whatever came into my head.
First thing Monday morning I handed in my project with a sinking feeling that my hastily thrown together would garner a big, red F with a request that my parents meet with my teacher to discuss my poor class work. After several nail biting days of waiting for the ax to fall, the biology teacher handed us back our papers commenting on how good each project was. Suddenly my name was mentioned. Instead of hearing how he wanted to see me after class, the entire class was informed that my report was unique and well done. Then the final bombshell was dropped:my report received an A-. I floated on cloud nine for the entire day.
The irony was not lost on me that my report, which was cobbled together in one evening earned the same grade as some of my fellow students who actually invested three months of hard, diligent labor into their projects. I had pulled a fast one on my teacher and to be honest it felt good. For me, that was the defining moment when I knew I possessed the ability to be a writer.