I Am A Writer

I've always been a reader.

I've always wanted to be a writer.

I can't remember not being able to read. I don't recall learning the alphabet, or struggling to sound out words, it just seems like the knowledge was always there. I was the kid that had to be forced to go outside because my nose was in a book, the kid that read under the covers when I should have been asleep. I still am I guess. Even now, a good book will keep me from doing things I should be doing, and keep me up until the wee hours of the morning. I almost always have a book with me, and have been known to read while waiting in line, or even while waiting on a stoplight to change.

I've always dabbled in writing. The first thing I really remember writing creatively was a play. It was something about a troll that lived behind a hill, and I think I even got some friends together to make a cardboard "hill" and produced my masterpiece in my parents' garage. I've kept a journal sporadically over the years, but never with any consistency, and I was a great letter writer in junior high and high school. Somewhere in the room over my parents' garage there are still several shoe boxes filled with letters from friends I made at camps and almost every note I passed in school. But I've never considered myself a writer. It was just something I wanted to do….someday.

Over the past few years, I've thought about writing more, but I still haven't done much about it. Several years ago I found NaNoWriMo, and I got all excited and motivated, and even cranked out a 50,000+ word novel in the month of November. I've never even gone back and re-read it. Last fall, my husband and I went to the John C. Campbell Folk School. (Great place, and probably something I should write about another time.) I took a writing class and love it, but since then haven't done anything other than think more about writing. I seem to always be waiting for the "muse" to strike. I read, I think of ways I might change the story I'm reading, I even read about writing, and I have scraps of paper all over the place with character and story ideas, but I don't actually write.

I've come to a stunningly original realization lately. A writer is someone who writes.

I may never be paid for writing, but I can be a writer. So this is my beginning. 

I am a writer.