I’ve always wanted to be a storyteller. As a child, I’d make up stories (i.e. lie) to get out of trouble. No, I don’t know what happened to that bracelet. I found it like that. Then when I wanted to bring my purse to school in first grade, I gave my next door neighbor babysitter a look and told her, of course, my mother allows me to have a purse at school. (To which I lost that very same day. Who allows a first grader to bring a purse to school anyway?) First rule of storytelling was to make it believable, which meant not blinking and keeping a straight face as you told your carefully rehearsed story. Without those essential tools, you created doubt in your audience. Every good story, no matter what genre, needs to make the reader believe it’s possible. So I was on my way to becoming a storyteller even when I convinced that girl on the bus that I’d been in a television show, and I could get her the autographs of the other stars in the show. (Sorry about that).
Then, I discovered books, and they- gasp- were lies that were acceptable and didn’t get the writer in trouble with their parents. I tried my hand at it when I was ten, and learned valuable lesson number two. When creating characters, base them loosely on real people or you might create a feud among your tween friends, and your dad will question if you think he’s as evil as the father in your story. I have never made that mistake again. Now I use pieces from people I know and mix them all up so no one can tell I was really talking about… Well, you get the idea.
After I learned I wanted to write stories, I had to find someone to listen to them because what’s a storyteller without an audience? Getting people to sit and listen when I was young and bossy was easier. Through bullying, I had a willing (ahem, captive) audience. Getting agents and publishers to read is a different story. I don’t think threats work as well with agents and editors as they did when I was a child hounding my friends, family, and occasionally the perfect stranger to read my latest creation. So now I have a whole new set of lessons to learn as I try to get stories published.
I’m sure my English students can’t wait, so that they can stop being my captive audience. For now, I’ll just blog about my stories and try to keep it entertaining.
