Hear Jim Reed’s Red Clay Diary: https://youtu.be/KENRqo7glmk
.
Life, actually…
.
HOW TO MURDER AN AUTHOR
.
During my Down South lifetime, I’ve met many unofficial members of the Deceased Authors Society.
.
These are people who long ago abandoned their hopes of becoming writers. People whose earliest bursts of inspiration were tamped down by well-meaning tutors.
.
Here’s an example:
.
Remember how great the feeling was in grammar school, when your teacher gave you your first writing assignment?
.
“Write an essay called ‘What I Did During My Summer Vacation.’”
.
Remember how you were first a little scared about having to write a whole page all by yourself? This takes courage.
.
Then, one night before the assignment is due, you begin to write the first sentence about how much fun you had last summer.
.
As you labor with each word, Number Two pencil in hand, you begin to actually FEEL the story. You re-experience joy and pain as you write,
.
“My dog Brownie fell in the lake and we saved him. I got bitten by three wasps. We got to eat ice cream three times on vacation.” And so on.
.
Then, because you can feel the emotions behind each word you laboriously block-letter on lined notebook paper, you are certain the reader will feel just as strongly as you.
.
You just know that lucky reader will feel the pain of the sting, smell the wet dog Brownie, experience Brownie’s rapid heart beat as you hug him close and dry him off, re-live that ice cream headache.
.
You at last finish the assignment, neatly re-copied, hoping that you spelled everything correctly, though you can’t figure out how to spell Kaopectate.
.
Next morning you beam as you hand in your paper, knowing that this is going to be a great year, a year in which your thoughts and adventures will be recognized and appreciated.
.
What actually happens is, you get the paper back next day with RED MARKS all over it. You misspelled Kaopectate. You forgot to put a period at the end of the second sentence. You failed to indent at the first paragraph. One sentence was missing a verb. And so on.
.
After you read the red marks six or seven times, you go back over everything to see if your teacher wrote anything on the front or back of the paper about your experience.
.
Did the teacher feel the wasp? Did the teacher laugh and sympathize with poor, wet Brownie? Did those wasp stings make teacher recall childhood?
.
No sign of anything but RED MARKS.
.
It takes years to sort your feelings out, to realize you’ll never be a real author.
.
And back then, the next time your teacher is about to hand out an assignment, you get a funny feeling in your stomach, vertical lines appear between your eyebrows, and you began to dread opening yourself up by writing down your joys and sorrows, just to have them ignored and, instead, RED MARKED.
.
You might have wound up like other adults I meet: “Well, I don’t keep a diary or write stories. I’m just not good at writing. I could never do that!”
.
As members of the Deceased Authors Society, they will never share their stories, never view their own experiences as being worthwhile.
.
This story, these stories, often have happier endings. Once grown and seasoned, many of us would-be writers develop a get-out-of-writers-block-FREE attitude. We awaken to the idea that there are no longer any teachers or RED MARK advocates hovering about.
.
As members of the Deceased Authors Society cast away their shackles, some of them blossom into full-speed-ahead writers who, each day, work hard to make up for lost time.
.
Next time you meet an author, ask about those RED MARK memories. See what hoops they had to jump through in order to get on with it.
.
In my case, I can’t stop writing. When I look back at those perceived barriers, I think, “What barriers? I don’t have time for barriers.”
.
Watch out—next story starts as soon as I sharpen my Number Two pencil
.
© Jim Reed 2023 A.D.
.