The Beginning

It started when I was four. I had an imaginary friend named Jessica with purple hair. My mother was amused until she had to set an extra place at the table for her. Her amusement turned into annoyance as she made extra sandwiches, poured extra bowls of cereal and packed extra picnic food for this new addition to my life. When Jessica ran away, she was a bit relieved. When I announced that Jessica had been hit by a car and died, she got worried. Was that normal? My imagination was running wild at an early age, but the best was yet to come. I hadn't yet learned how to spell, to write. That was coming soon enough.

In kindergarten, we had to make All About Me books. My mother was shocked to flip through my handwritten and colored pages to find that the book didn't contain much about me. I got very creative with it. While most kids were writing about their actual pets in the pet section, I was drawing pictures and naming pets that didn't exist. Not your garden variety furry pets either. Those were too boring. I had caterpillars! My family section was a bit embellished. There are sisters listed there that didn't exist. My favorite thing to do was swing on the bar in my closet in my squirrel costume. I didn't have a squirrel costume. My dad would have "blistered my bottom" if he caught me swinging on the bar again. I had already broken it once before. But it was fun to pretend that I was allowed to do that!

I went on to create elaborate worlds in my mind as well as on paper. There was a ghost carnival with Disneyland type rides that I told my friends existed in my closet. All we had to do was step inside, close our eyes and the "elevator" would take us down to them. I wrote stories about the moon. I had vivid nightmares. Mom worried more. It wasn't until high school that she stopped worrying and started realizing the creativity was just a part of who I was. My freshman English teacher encouraged it, nurtured it. I wrote and wrote and wrote more. I poured my teenage angst into poetry. I escaped into different worlds in short stories. I wrote the pep rally scripts. The football coaches were kind enough to indulge me - dressing up as all kinds of villians to be foiled by the football team. I got an offer to write a documentary my senior year of high school. College brought more script writing, as did life after graduation. But I always returned to my first love. Creating my own worlds, I could be that carefree child again as I ran free in them. Good always triumphed over evil. The bad guys lost in the end. I'm still at it today. Capturing those ideas that float around in my head, trapping them on paper for my own enjoyment (and friends and family as well!).

When did it start for you? At what age did you start creating? Write your first story?