When you get too old to play with dolls (Melissa Robbins)

          As kids, my best friend and I acted out stories we read.  Naturally, we created our own adventures with our dolls too.  When I got too old to play with dolls, my active imagination had to do something and I turned to writing.  Perhaps those voices in my head started early. 

            I had to write, but it was in secret.  I kept my stories hidden from all eyes.  It was my version of diary writing.  To a teen girl, my life was boring and I lived vicariously through my characters who were far braver than me as Fox sailed on the high seas with pirates and Moira battled Scottish ghosts, curses, and murder.  My Fox story came about as a ‘what if’ (there’s that active imagination coming out).  My dad was a sailor and I pretended what would happen if we got caught in a thunderstorm, because my mom would NEVER let Dad and I sail if there was even a remote chance of a sprinkle.  Moira’s story started off as a dream.  Also in my teen years, I experienced love and heartbreak.  By writing about romance and adventure, my characters found those things that eluded me.      

           The writing slacked off until my son was born with heart defects.  Spending hours in the hospital, I wrote to keep my mind from going bonkers and to pass the time.  Those characters, the early incarnates of Wren and Company became my support group (my family) in a time of need. 

    

        Now I have a couple of hours to myself when my kids are at school.  I use that time to live vicariously through my characters again.  Not because I don’t like my life or that it’s boring (boring is good), it’s like hanging out with old friends and I want to see what they’re up to.   

Obsession

I am a writer.

We've all written.  Some of us started making up stories early, others came to it a little later.  And for a few of us, it's been an obsession.

That's me.  The obsessed one.  As I've mentioned, books were always my friends.  Add an imagination that apparently began before I can remember, and that late night reading by nightlight, it's no wonder.  By the time I learned how to put all those things together, I wrote.

I wrote plays, and I wrote letters to my five penpals, never missing a beat.  I was the one who made up the pretend games we played and insisted we stick to the "script."  In sixth grade, reading a book and writing a paper on it was heaven for me.  I learned about Amelia Earhart, James A. Naismith, and Helen Keller.  In high school, my favorite class was English, especially Senior English, which consisted of more reading and writing.

It wasn't until I was eighteen and bought a secondhand portable typewriter from a friend that I sat down to write my first book.  And what a book!  Most of it was written on onion skin paper.  (Anybody remember that?)  Like Joan, I had no idea where the story was going, but I just kept typing and typing.  The stack of paper when I was finished was a good three inches tall--all single spaced.  Mistakes?  Who cared!  I'd written a book.  I'd met my goal of writing a book.  Not that it was a good book, but I'd done it.

Years of family and crafts passed, and my oldest daughters, in middle school, started reading The Babysitters Club books.  After reading one, I decided I could do better, (ha ha) so I started reading middle reader and YA books.  And I started writing them, even taking a correspondence course (by mail), to help me "hone my craft."  Before I finished the second course, family issues pulled me away, and I put writing aside, thinking someday I'd get back to it.

Fast forward a few more years, and I was reading romance and thought it might be fun to give writing one a try.  It was!  And so it began.  A year or so and several manuscripts later, I discovered RWA.  Another four years later, and I sold my first book to Silhouette/Harlequin.

I write because that's what I've always done. Twenty-one manuscripts, fourteen of them published, and I still keep on writing.  I've thought about quitting.  I sometimes miss the things I put aside so I could write, but characters continue to appear in my mind--and won't stop talking, so the only way to keep them quiet is to write their stories.  An obsession?  Probably.  Besides, I enjoy it.  I am a writer.

Why I Write by J Vincent

The topic for April is Why We Write. In the beginning wrote because I had to.  I was driven to by the characters in my mind who would not stop talking, by the stories that kept growing and blooming, prodding and pushing until they were on paper--in the good old days--and in the word processor now.  I can still recall how the first book I ever wrote took shape in my mind.  Once the concept occurred to me each day brought  a new scene to mind and more dialogue sprang to life.  Incidents caused chain reaction chapters. I had to start writing it down even though I thought I was an idiot to try and write a book.  After all how do you explain voices in your head to people who don’t have them in theirs?  The characters in my first book didn’t quiet down and go away until their story was done.  And so it was with the next story, my first regency.

That first regency which later was published as The Bond of Honour, got rejection after rejection.  Frustrated, I sat down and made a list of what the editors wanted in a regency.  This was the first time I wrote to SELL.  I finished the book. and sent it off.  The next day I looked at the first chapter and frantically wondered how I could get it back.  That it was drivel and poorly written were only some of the things I thought.  Two weeks later I got a call from Vivian Stephens at Dell Publishing in New York.  She loved it.  She bought it.  Thomasina. 

Three years later what was “in” changed.  My stories were out.Three growing children, orthodontia bills and all that sent me back to teaching.  When I retired from teaching I wanted to know if I could write an entire book again. So I wrote just to see if I could still do it.  I started with a plot that I had described to my daughters with such detail when they were small they still remembered the plot as adults.  I had only begun that book when my characters once again took charge.  They killed my villain way too early putting me in a dilemma as how to proceed.  From somewhere, I’m still not sure where, came what turned into the Honour Series. As I continued what became the first book, Honour’sDebt, six other stories  for the series came to me in full detail.  I wrote four of them.  The fourth was begun when I was having increasing trouble with health issues.  These issues became so serious I was unable to continue writing.  When I was well enough to return to that book, I read what I had written,  scrapped it, started over.  Shortly after I finished it I was again too ill to continue writing.

Somewhere along the line of unending medical bouts these past years the voices grew quieter. less insistent.  The stories are no longer prodding and pushing to be told.  These days I am the one who has to pull out the whip and get myself into writing.  BITHOK we say--Butt in chair, Hands on the keyboard.  It is very good advice.  Even when the characters were demanding, I found tenacity and perseverance to be a writer’s, at least this one’s, best friend. If the book doesn’t get written no one can read it.

Does it matter why I write?  Why anyone writes?  I don’t think so mainly because the “why” is a kaleidoscope of reasons determined by our environment, our mood, where we are at in our lives, and many other things.  Sometimes I write simply to prove I can.  At other times it is to experience the flow of words, the beauty of vocabulary.  Or I write simply because I made a commitment--as in this blog.  I write because others, my sister in particular, expect it.  Through all or despite all of the reasons I write, I learned that writing satisfies something in me.  Last week I started on the fifth book of the Honour series.  With a goal of only a page a day, it’s a pretty wimpy effort, but the voices are growing stronger, the story more demanding.  Sometimes BITHOK is the only way I write.  Whatever works as they say!

Success, praise, whatever you want to call it is another reason to write.  Who isn’t thrilled when someone tells them their book is terrific, or that it helped them through a rough time? I recently received a reminder of this from a compliment on Never to Part, my regency paranormal released last month. Also  Honour’s Choice Book 2 in the Honour Series which is now available was given 4 stars by Donna Brown in May’s RT Book Reviews.  There’s more suspense than romance in the second entry to Vincent’s Honour series, but both keep the reader on the edge as finely-wrought characters tell an exciting tale. Unresolved circumstances leave the reader eager for book three.  
These are some of the reasons I write.  Are some of them your reasons too?