Finding Your Magic

Someone once asked me how I learned to write so well.  She said it looked like magic the way I could lay down the words without seeming to think hard about it.  You know what?  I don't know. I just think a bit, and then I put pen to paper and the pen moves as if it is an extension of my mind. Sometimes it even moves ahead of my conscious mind. I suppose my writing has become a subconscious or unconscious part of me. 

I have other theories but in actual fact, I don't really know.

It could be due to the fact that I learned to read really young.  I don't remember ever learning my ABCs.  I just knew how to read.  I was told my grandpa used to seat me on his lap when he read the newspaper and then he would read aloud while moving his finger under the words.  I moved out of his house when I was two years old.  So that tells you how young I was.

It could be due to the fact that I loved reading.  My father had to punish me to stop me from reading so much.  I'd wait till he went to sleep before taking out my torch light to read under the blankets.  Then the next morning I'd be like a zombie and he just KNEW I had been reading, instead of sleeping.  No matter what he did, he couldn't stop me reading.

It could be due to the fact that I loved stories.  So I'd read anything and everything I could find.  I finished all the kid story books and encyclopedias in the house by the time I was ten years old.  Both my parents are teachers and we had books everywhere.  At one point I became desperate enough to climb to the highest shelves.  AND I found my mother's treasure trove of Mills and Boons.  Did I mention I was ten?  I guess I learned the pattern of exposition + complication + climax + denouement + resolution pretty young.

It could also be due to the fact that I liked to analyse stuff.  I would break down stories to their basic form.  I would keep lists of foreign phrases that looked good in stories.  I even kept lists of first names and surnames that could be given to characters.  And yes I wrote stories in my school exercise books and when I ran out of pages, I'd toss the book somewhere and continue in other blank books.

It's been nearly half a century.. and I'm still doing the same things.  Reading, writing, analysing...

So, I guess if you want to be good at something, if you want to be excellent at something, you need to find something you have a certain aptitude for.  Something you have a knack for.  Something people can't stop you doing and doing and doing.  Even when it didn't need to be done.

Of course then you need to see if you can make money out of it.  I haven't tried to make money out of my writing because it is something I do for pleasure and something I do when I want to do it and not when someone forces me to do it.