For The Love Of Words

   Like most, if not all, of you I had dreams as a child. Some children dreamed of being a policeman, or a fire fighter. Others longed to become teachers, or doctors, or lawyers. Maybe even President. All of these are fine dreams and worthy professions. What did I dream? I wanted to be a writer.
   I set out on this path in my early teen years. I wrote many things ranging from poetry to prose. All were composed with as much literary sophistication and vocabulary as I could muster from my fourteen or fifteen years of public schooling. They were crap. I mean it. I still have a folder filled with the stuff. I look at it every now and then and all I can do is shake my head. But I don't throw it away. I just can't bring myself to do that.
   Here's the thing. Like a foreign language, your literary voice must be utilized to stay sharp. Neglect it for too long and it grows rusty, dull, difficult to use. And I went for a very long time neglecting my literary voice. I simply became caught up in the commonality of life and for more than twenty years I didn't write a thing aside from the occasional signature on a check, or a grocery list, things like that.
    Inside, my literary voice was screaming at me in fury. Every now and then it made a desperate attempt to escape the bonds in which I had locked it so completely. It would send a conversation between people who did not exist flashing across the inside of my mind. Or perhaps a paragraph or two of some random creation would erupt, flare briefly and then sputter out as I ignored it. This pattern continued for the next two plus decades, until one day everything changed.
   I was in the middle of my half hour commute home from work. The radio was on National Public Radio. It was a Saturday and I was listening to Garrison Keillor on A Prairie Home Companion when a commercial aired. The commercial was for a writing contest that NPR was calling Three Minute Fiction, the premise of which was to write a complete story that could be read on the air in three minutes or less. My literary voice reached out from the void with gnarled fingers made arthritic from decades of disuse and took hold of my consciousness with a grip that only two things could break, death or writing. I summarily dismissed the former and opted to write. The entire story composed itself in my head on the drive.
   Upon arriving home I went straight to my computer and started writing. My literary voice began cackling in gleeful celebration. It grew stronger with every word that appeared on the screen. By the time I had finished pounding out the some six hundred words of the story I had become something that I had forgotten until that moment that I was supposed to be. A writer.
   Those first few stories were not bad. They were conceived fairly well in plot and were executed as well as could be expected for a literary voice that was just now relearning how to speak. Then one day I bounced an idea that had come into my head off my wife. She loved it. I started writing that day. I remember the date. It was not so long ago. May 23rd, 2010. For the next four and a half months I wrote nearly every day and early in October, I finished my first novel. I called it Blood Ties, though that title is not set in stone, or ink rather. It is intended to be the first installment of a series I am calling Guardians Among Us.
   I have since started work on two more novels, the sequel to Blood Ties and an unrelated novel. My literary voice is floating high and speaks to me constantly. I tried explaining how I feel about writing to my wife once, this is what I told her.
   We all talk to ourselves, but when you're a writer the people you speak to are your characters, and you share those conversations with the world.