Origins of Creativity in Writing

There are numerous Blogfests running on any given day. Some are ongoing and others are one shots. With all that run, I do tend to pick around the lot, finding the ones that really interest me…and, hopefully, you.

Origins: When did your writing dream begin? is the brain child of DL Hammons at Cruising Altitude,  and he has three co-hosts: Katie Mills aka Creepy Query Girl ; Matthew MacNish at The QQQE ; and Alex Cavanaugh at Alex J. Cavanaugh.

To find the other blogs participating in this blogfest, click HERE or the Origins logo. There are close to 200 writers participating. Check them out.

I’ve also written a Flash Fiction piece  Origins: Entitled on my creative fiction blog, Tale Spinning. I hope you enjoy the story.

I can’t really pinpoint an exact time when writing became one of my dreams. It feels like it’s always been there, at the back of everything I’ve done in my life.  I don’t feel I’ve ever been tied down to wanting to “be” just one thing, ever. When I have done that, I find that I tend to get bored: especially the times when I’ve played the money game (read: non-creative pursuits).

As a kid, I read comics, watched TV and went to the movies. Outside of school projects, I would create little things for myself. Mini-comics were a way to pass time when I was bored in class. I’d take paper and fold it down, and then again, creating a sequential booklet for myself to draw in (lots of stick figures) and write short pieces. These would get passed around to friends later. I don’t remember ever getting caught.

There were stories I wrote for sleep-away camp newspapers, mainly mash-ups (yes, plagiarisms) of others work, combining different elements into one piece. While never criticized for that, I was often praised for “imaginative writing” and writing skills. I knew the truth, and just shrugged my shoulders.

High school changed that. I worked on the DeWitt Clinton newspaper for a year, writing articles, learning the craft of setting up the newspaper from scratch. I was really involved, and was going to be promoted to an editor’s slot when my parents told me we were moving to Westchester County. While my dreams of the paper were shot at that point (the new HS paper was not very open to someone new coming in), I did continue to write.

Off and on, I would write poetry, short stories, begin ideas for novels…and more times than not they would languish, first just as a pile of legal pad paper and then committed electronically and saved. All through this, I was always hoping I’d have my name on a book (or comic book) as a writer. It was a passing dream that wove itself throughout most of my life, a goal I always hoped I’d achieve.

2011 saw a new stage of writing for me. I created my second blog, Tale Spinning, for experiments in creative writing. Starting only in February of that year, I wound up writing close to 200 short pieces of fiction. I’ve now had two short stories published in anthologies, have my own eStory published, received a number of blogging/writing awards, been asked to write a number of guest blogs, and have won a few online writing contests.

Still to come: holding that physical book with my name on the cover in my hands.

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