Starting Point

When I was digging through my old stories, I found treasure untold. First of all, yes, I do hold onto copies of old stories, excised chapters and failed starts. You never know when inspiration might strike! 

But for this project, I explored boxes of handwritten (!) notes and stories. As it was an era before computers were used as personal devices—at least in the beginning of my writing efforts, the word processor was unheard of, and those that were available did not store information. I used to write on paper I dug up from somewhere in our house, sitting on the floor of my bedroom, crouched over my lap desk, until my hand got cramped and sore. Like in those ancient days of yore, when paper was a precious commodity, I would fill up every possible space available. 

Yet, I had a strong sense of what a book “should” look like. Here is a sample of one of my first attempts at a “book”, with the crooked cut pages and all:  

And the chapters: 

The writing was what you would expect for an 8 or 9 year old, with some extremely odd fits and starts, creative efforts at chapters and no sense of where a paragraph starts and ends, yet I could see the unspoken desire that would take me here, with two books published and one more on the way. These Janice Gray Mysteries fit into the era that I was reading Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden Mysteries, girls exploring their world and solving murders. 

Reading the story I wrote is hysterical. It went nowhere, didn’t really carry any sense of tension, and though there was a resolution, it tended to end with a flat “so there!” as if I just got tired of writing and ended it (a strong possibility, although I don’t remember exactly). The artwork I added to fill in the blanks reveals that I am far more tuned to words than I am to art or drawing. Yet as I see that story and read it again, I realize something far more important—we have to start somewhere. I did discover, through this brief foray into mystery writing when I was eight or nine, that mystery is not my genre—it still isn’t my genre—but the effort I put in to create a story was pointing at an inner desire that would unfold over years. The genuine creativity and effort at expression is very clear. 

Someone once said it takes 10,000 hours to master anything. I put in 10,000 hours, for sure—I have the boxes of stories to prove it, although I did shift over to computers by the time I ended high school, so the paper trail ends there. I didn’t stay in the mystery genre—my next foray was into science fiction/fantasy, where I found myself with many more ideas. It was also where I eventually ended up. But I had to start somewhere, and this was it!