I am a Writer

I started writing...

when I was three years old. I used to sit on my Dad's lap while he studied for the MCATs and scribble in all his textbooks. He would get frustrated and give me some scraps of paper and let me go at it. I was writing gibberish, of course. But I had been bitten by that "bug". Why do people call it the "bug"? Anyway, I was stung and from that moment on, all I wanted to be was a writer. The making of a writer starts with reading. I was read to as an infant and I started reading very early. I had lots of books. Let me preface this by saying, we were poor. No no, we were "po'"! But somehow my life was filled with the riches of books galore! All the Dr. Seuss books, Ferdinand, Goodnight Moon, The Little Engine that Could. And when I got a bit older, The Babysitter's Club came into my life (a gift from my mom).I had a membership card and everything! The book fair was my favorite and least favorite time of school. I never had any money to buy anything from the book fair and my heart sank every time I entered the colorful set up in the library. I watched as kids, who did not appreciate books, bought books they would never read to their heart's content like I would. I could not understand the injustice!

For as long as I could remember reading had always played a big role in my life. Growing up my favorite place to go was-yes you guessed it- THE LIBRARY (in my Oprah voice)! I checked out as many books that I was allowed and kept them. I wanted those books! "What did the library need with them, they'll get more", I thought. It got to the point where I was stealing books from school. I was a book kleptomaniac, taking books from people's houses, keeping books people let me borrow. In my mind, these books were not being read properly and thus not being cared for the way that I could care for them. They needed me. 

I spent the first five years of my life as an only child, and most of the time alone. Yes I had family and friends here and there, but I always felt different from them, not adequate enough for them. I never liked the things they liked and I spent my time with them pretending. Perhaps at the time there was another little black girl in the world thinking the same thing. Too bad we never found each other. My mother, ultimately, became my best friend. She took me everywhere and did everything with me. The circus, the park, the library, the movies. When I was 10, she took me to see Amistad...yes she took me to see Amistad! Instead of it freaking the hell out of me, it intrigued and inspired me. For me, it was not a movie about slavery. One of the moments that struck me was when the main character (Djimon Hounsou's character) is in his village and he looks back loving at his wife before being kidnapped. It was a moment that said so much, even to my young self. Here was man, thriving in his own space, no worries whatsoever, never could have imagined what would happen to him. Those are what stories are for me: creating what you would never, even in your wildest dreams, could imagine. I look back on that moment in the movie theatre day and am grateful my mom, my best friend, for exposing me to such things even as a kid.

With me being lonely and having my mother as my only true friend, I had more then enough time to build a repertoire of characters- who were my imaginary friends- for my stories. By third grade, my mom started buying me journals as birthday and Christmas gifts. It would take me no time to  fill these journals with stories I was too young to write about. Sometimes the characters left the page and I would act them out in the bath tub, while eating or  in bed when I supposed to be sleeping. In a nutshell, I was always talking to myself- probably why I didn't have many friends. By the time  I figured out how to record my voice on tape(holding down the play and record button on the boom box) I was unstoppable! And then the acting "bug" hit me. But I was shy so the acting part of my life comes a bit later. 

It was in elementary school, fifth grade, when I started writing my first novel in one of the journals Mom bought me. I ended up self-publishing that novel my first year in college and selling it for a small chunk of change. It was ahead of its time--ahead of my time- and looking back at it now, it was not very good, but people who read it, liked it, they said. Then in the eighth grade, I wrote a second novel using the names of the people in my school. It was provocative...had sex...and murder and the other kids liked it. They enjoyed seeing their names in a story. Thinking back on it, I realize how wild that was. But I was inspired by the wild, sex-crazed kids I went to school with.

Life inspired me to write. Not flowers or nature. Not paintings. Not God; The good and the bad of my life; the life I wanted, the lives around me. I am currently working on my second novel, inspired by my trip to the Congo in 2002. I've been writing it for quite some time...no I will not say how long...but I want to finish. And I will finish it. 

Because...

I am a Writer.