Hodgepodge

Day 6 Task 1

Day 6 Task 1:Write an essay, not exceeding 750 words, on your writing journey through life. Tell us when you began to write, what you wrote, who were the teachers or mentors or relatives who guided you, who discouraged you, which authors' work stimulated you, inspired you to write, how you went about improving your work, and so on.

I learned to write in first grade in France. I have no recollections of any creative writing assignments in that time, as the French school system was still kind of restrictive and very authoritarian at that time. I moved to Germany for second grade and was put in the class of Frau Reich. That was her real name. It’s not her fault, to have such a name in Germany. She was awesome. She taught me German from second to sixth grade and English from third to sixth grade. She is the one person who laid the foundation for the writing you see here.

In third and fourth grade she had us write a lot of creative stories, using prompts. I remember one day, our prompt was to write about the journey of a coin. Now, I took some artist’s liberty and turned the coin into a five Deutsche Mark bill. I remember parts of this story to this day and I got a top grade for thinking outside the box. Frau Reich was always very proud of me, as she loved languages and I was talented at those.

In middle school I had a teacher who thought he was the reincarnated Edgar Allan Poe. He wore his hair, mustache and even fashion like him! Again, a true fact. Unfortunately, he thought my twelve and thirteen year old brain would be able to process the madness that is E. A. Poe in all its glory. But I wasn’t able to cope with that lunatic’s imagination. Now don’t get me wrong, the man was a genius, but not to me. When I was a young teen, alcoholism and his other vices were completely incomprehensible to me. Wanna-be Edgar Allan Poe got me expelled from school for talking back one day, when I put the latest volume of twisted poetry down on his desk and told him in no uncertain terms that the stuff in those books sucks.

I had a woman German teacher from half of eighth grade through tenth grade. She was cool, but I don’t have many memories about the things we learned. From eleventh through thirteenth grade (the norm in Germany) I had a teacher who hated me. He hated me since I arrived at that school in eighth grade and he had kept his grudge. (I wonder if he and E. A. Poe worshipper knew each other) To make a long story short, he failed me in German on my last exam, to try and keep me from graduating with a high school diploma. Not very encouraging.

Around the time I was nineteen and twenty, I wrote some erotica. It was meant for me and nobody else. A boyfriend snooped, read it and told me it was awful. I didn’t try creative writing again until I moved to California in 2006 at 35.

My husband, some friends and I played this role playing game “Shadow Run”. It’s a very low key game, in terms of what you need. There are rule books, to give a frame work and books to help spark adventures, but the players use dice, paper and pencil for notes. That’s it. Not electronics, gadgets, very relaxing in a world of fast paced video games.

My husband was always the game master. One day he told me and the other guy we played with, to write back stories to our characters. It was meant to be one or two pages. I wrote seven pages. Then, I started thinking about my character and his world.

I was also very depressed at the time and felt that life, child rearing, my marriage, all of it was futile. So I escaped into my hero’s world. I wrote a first book of about 200 pages. Then I wrote a second book of 400 pages. The third book was slimmer, maybe 100 pages. In May 2008 I found Writing.com, things changed. My horizon expanded beyond my own world. In the beginning I read and reviewed mostly. About six weeks ago, I returned to my roots. I write every day. Sometimes a flash fiction, a contest entry, or I polish an older piece. Reviews and feedback have helped me get better and grow a thicker skin to critique, as long as it stays polite. I still hate it when people tell me my work sucks, but it doesn’t stop me. Because on WDC, there are people who will extend a virtual hug and keep me writing, even if they don’t like my stuff.

750 words without task description