The Immature Muse

My mom tells me that I started telling stories even before I could talk.  I'd be sitting in my crib, making all of my stuffed animals talk to one another.  Since I hadn't mastered language yet, she had no idea what the storyline was, but I was very serious about the whole thing.



By the time I was in Grade Three, I was actually writing.  Mrs. Reece, my teacher, was amazed by my stories.  For an eight-year-old, I guess they were pretty advanced (although from what little I remember, they starred only one character -- a St. Bernard named Tippy in the Swiss Alps).

Fast-forward to Grade Seven, and I was writing scripts for my favourite TV show, Tales of the Gold Monkey.  I wrote with enthusiasm and dedication -- particularly during math class.  (But what Mr. Blinn didn't know didn't hurt me.)

Grade Nine found me in the school library every day before school and at lunch, feverishly scribbling away at a 400+ page stack of loose leaf featuring Duran Duran and passing the completed sheets to a receiving line of anxious readers, while various adults nodded sagely and whispering about how they'd be able to say, "I knew her when..."

In Grade Ten, I wrote stories running the gamut of being set at the Kentucky Derby to a series of stories based on a-ha's Hunting High and Low album, to an amusing piece of fluff featuring my latest crush as a top-secret spy with an amazing car (I then gave it to said guy as a birthday gift -- unknowingly the day he started seeing my best friend).  I kept writing in high school, dabbling in poetry as well as fiction, and to this day when I bump into a member of the Class of '88, I inevitably get asked, "Are you still writing?"

In university, my Friday night hot date was composed of a two-litre bottle of Diet Pepsi, a stack of fresh loose leaf, and a black Papermate pen.  I'd lie on my stomach on my dorm room floor and start writing at about 8:00 PM, and before I went to bed, I'd have a short story written.  Some of them were really good (I was a two-time winner of a national short fiction contest, in 1990 and 1992) and some of them were really awful.  As my mentor, Dr. Graham Adams, in his eroded North Carolina accent said, "You don't do 'sappy' well."  (And it's true -- I don't.)

In 1996 I got married...and stopped writing.  Not because I was discouraged by my husband (far from it), but because I was just too darn happy.  And so things like my vampire novel (long before the current fanged craze) and my short story collection featuring people on a bus all got put on the backburner -- on 3.5" floppies that I can't even open now.

Well.  So.  Here I am, at the ripe old age of forty (still puzzling that one out, actually), and I'm trying to write again.  And it's frustrating, because it's not going well.  My inner author, after spending the first twenty years of her life being some sort of child prodigy, is having a hard time dealing with the fact that her voice hasn't changed, nor has her skill level.  I'm looking at the stuff I've written and it just looks like amateur night.  I know a lot of it is just that I'm out of practice, but at the same time it's just plain blah.  My muse has a severe case of arrested adolescence.  What was brilliant and astounding when I was fifteen is just plain silly now.  I have to shake the Etch-a-Sketch and start over at Square One.

In other words, I have to learn to write again, and pretend I never knew how.  That's the only way I'm going to be able to shake my bad habits and find my new voice.

Here's hoping I have one.

(Not so-subtle plea for attention:  If you've ever thought about leaving a comment, now would be a fantastic time to do it.)