Catching The Bug - My American Life

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/23/drama-bug

Drama isn't really my thing, I like the theater, but I was never one for being the person on the stage talking and acting and doing stuff like that. The bug that I caught, and I caught it hard, was writing.

The writing bug hit me in 5th grade. 5th grade was when writing happened in my world. I don't remember if I was in trouble or not (that comes later) but I remember the prompt that our teacher gave us. The first line of the story, or at least the start of the entire thing was, one morning I woke up and I was on the moon. From there, I went bonkers and wrote, and wrote, and wrote. I created a story.

It was the worst type of story, it was full of people that I knew from my class, it had me as the main character, it was exactly what you would expect from a fifth grader.

But the bug bit, and I was attached to writing. There's just something about writing that is empowering, that is amazing, that is perfect for me. I love that you can take a blank page and do whatever you want with it, make whatever you want, do whatever you want, control everything to be exactly the way that you want. Nothing is out of order, nothing is said improperly, no scene is wrong, everything is exactly how I want it to be telling the story how I want it to be told. Pretty much when I'm writing I get to control everything.

And then came the crazy point of college, when I could get into a class and talk to other people that had the same bug as me. There wasn't anything working up to that point where I could talk to other people about the way I like characters and settings and making it all from scratch, the way I do. I wish that there was a club, or a group before that, but it wasn't until Carol Lynch William's class where I could sit down around a table and talk to other people who want to be authors, talk about their characters and their stories the same way that I talked about mine.

Unlike all of the other bugs you can get, writing isn't exactly a team sport. It's not like I can go out and work with a group of writers to write a story, typically that's a solo procedure. The times that you write in a group are limited, so being able to sit down in a group and talk about writing and talk about literature in the eyes of a writer, was perfect. It was what really got me hooked into the world of writing because instead of me just being a weird kid that did his own thing, I realized that I was a weird kid and there were other weird kids just like me, who liked the exact same things I do, and talk and think the same way that I do.