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Thursday, November 22, 2018

The Struggle of Being an Inferior Storyteller


I debated long and hard about writing this post, but I had a need to get my thoughts out. If I deemed to post it than that’s why you’re reading it now. Let me start at the beginning, when I started this creative process of putting words to paper. Yes, I started writing back in the day when it was nothing but notebooks and those chunky word processors. Not everyone had a computer or internet, that was mainly for libraries and school computer labs.

I fell in love with the written word early in life due to my dad’s parents. I’d go to their house every weekend or every other, each night they’d lie down in bed before going to sleep to read and it was the start of a lifelong habit. Yet I didn’t read kid books, they loved detective stories and horror. I don’t know if I even understood them or the words, but I remembered loving them. It was getting lost in worlds where the good guy always won. I developed a fascination with Zane Grey and the mystique of the old west.

When people ask when I knew I wanted to be a writer, I always say at 8 when I wrote the worst poem know to the literary world. And maybe it did start there, but my life changed with one book. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs. He created a gritty world with all the nastiness and horror, surreal and realism combined. All I knew is I wanted to write one day. Be a published author.