My Published Articles for ViewsHound: Am I a Born or Made Writer?

Friday, December 23, 2011

Am I a Born or Made Writer?

I am not quite sure what the correct answer is, but I feel I am both. My early childhood has never been devoted to writing or art activities. It was science and mathematics that was emphasized in my early education. Later in my high school years, for some twist of luck, I was chosen by my English instructor to be editor of our high school newspaper. I was forced to write articles as fillers for the newspaper and was taught the basics of news writing and editing. I also started writing poetry in both English and our national language (Tagalog). During my high school years, I entertained the thought of taking journalism as a career in college. My parents however discouraged me, stating there is no money in writing and I will not be able to support a family. They wanted me to be a lawyer, doctor of medicine or a catholic priest. At their urgings, I enrolled as a pre-medical student at the University of the Philippines, Iloilo College. At the end of my second year, I learned I will never be a good doctor as the sight of blood nauseated me. I shifted to Chemistry and the rest is history.

My years as an undergraduate and graduate student emphasized science, mathematics and engineering. It was only after my retirement that I started blogging and learned that I enjoy writing. This is true also for my oldest son. He wrote a novel (Cloyne Court) after finishing law school and now is on his second novel. He told me he writes as a hobby and is a relaxation therapy for him. Writing to him is a good diversion from his hectic life as a prosecuting attorney here in Northern California.

There is a common saying that if you can talk, you can write. But great writing is a born talent and I believe can not be taught. The passion to write is born. People have different reasons why they write. A few writes for the sake of writing and can not survive without it. Others write to earn a living and work hard to be a successful writer, reporter or novelist.

So why do I write for ViewsHound. First, I enjoy writing. Second, to advertise my beach resort in the Philippines and last but not least is to get affirmation from readers and other writers that they enjoy reading my articles. Reading positive comments from others is an ego boost and makes me feel alive and useful during this stage of my life (retirement and old age).

Getting a monetary award and badges are another ego boosts, but I have learned these are no longer my primary incentives why I am writing for ViewsHound. I have also learned not to compare myself with the other writers. I have my own style of writing and if I write from the heart, nothing can go wrong.

Most writers that I know write because they love writing. To them writing is just like breathing. These born writers do not work hard to create an excellent article, because their writing comes from the heart and their soul. Others write with a lot of work, training and pain. Good writers run in the family as exemplified by the family of Stephen King. Most writers however are made and only become good writers through hard work and constant practice. The most common traits of good writers are patience and persistence, whether their writing talent is inborn or just developed.

Allow me to quote Jan Bird from her recent article, The Writing Bug. "Writing for me right now, is like love. It isn't something I do, it happens to me. It takes me completely by surprise when I least expect it and then it absolutely refuses to let go until it wants to. It's intoxicating and irrational".

This is how a born writer feels everyday of his/her life. Writing to inborn writers must feel like addiction or a compulsion that must be satiated.

How about you? Are you a born writer or a made writer? Do you agree with the statement that good writers can be made but great writers are born? I will be glad to hear from you!

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Guest Article from Susan Creamer Joy

In The Silence, by Susan Creamer Joy.

Today's guest article is from Susan Creamer Joy. Susan is one of my favorite authors in the ViewsHound community. Susan writes, draws, paints and cobbles together art from found objects making a variety of creations from jewelry to religious shrines. She frequently sports burns on her fingers from her soldering iron, paint on her palms and ink under her fingernails, but her hair is usually combed. When she is not losing time in the creative vortex of her studio, she is likely to be putting her knowledge of metaphysics and esoteric principles including Tarot, numerology, astrology and graphology to good use in consultations. Her children are grown, her husband still works and her four dogs believe she needs serious help. The title of her article is "A Matter Of Love And Death". Thank you Susan.

By the time they reached my bedroom door, I was already sitting up – my stomach ratcheted in the tense grip of an unnamed anxiety; my pillow, unburdened of my drowsy head.

To this day I cannot explain how I heard them coming up those stairs in their bare feet or how I knew that my father struggled to hold his composure as my mother unnaturally clutched at the folds of her dressing gown and followed him through the dark just a little too closely.

As the wooden groan of those old stairs tore into my bones that morning like a hacksaw, all I could see between the predawn shadows was the letter I’d written just hours earlier to my boyfriend, Chris, propped against the lamp on my desk across the room awaiting an envelope.

I had not slept well. It was late November and there had been so many changes since the middle of August when he left for the Air Force in Texas to begin basic training and I began my third new school in as many years.

The conspiracy between fate and the last surge of the Vietnam draft had broken apart the every-waking-minutes of our two-year union with unceremonious indifference. All that night my sleep had been infested by difficult dreams and by the illogical fear that truth and reality were merging into a darkness only a martyr could grasp; and at sixteen, martyrdom seemed reasonable only for the nuns among the poor in Bangladesh

I tried to remind myself that he would be home on leave for Thanksgiving in another few days. It was the only tether to calm I could find, but reviewing the facts offered little relief from my baseless fears.

Chris had been girding his pacifist sensibilities preparing to fight in an unpopular war that had not yet slaughtered its last innocent. I was hovering just over the line of inclusion at an exclusive girl’s school – missing him – and finding myself at odds with these young women and their attachment to propriety and with the prep-school veneer that blinded them to the fact that they were no better than anyone else.

Neither one of us was coping well with the worlds into which we were respectively summoned, and although we both knew that the best hope for any future together depended upon our individual successes apart, it was far from comforting most days.

But in spite of our discomfort, we each did our best; and, of course, there were the letters: Thin, plain-paper sheets with row after row after row of inky blue words penned with the intensity and awkward locutions of a love learned too soon. It had come down to just that little, but without them, I would have had nothing.

Chris was learning to fly. I was learning to drive, and both of us were aching to transport our souls to an earlier time through the hallowed intercourse of memories and dreams. Of course, as with all progress, there was the positive element: We were both clean and drug-free for the first time in years.

Now, without pretense, both healthy cognition and sincere motivation surfaced regularly in my psychology and prompted me to care about myself and to arbitrate against all temptation for a better standing in the world, in school and in my own eyes. I even did my homework.

No longer was I escaping today but, instead, living for my day of escape. Lying still in the dark of my room, I listened to the slow, padded footfall of my parents approaching and looked to the floor and to my history book half hidden beneath the nightstand where I’d tossed it the night before. Even in this early morning dark I could make out the swirls and stars in colored marker and the bubble-formed letters that spelled C H R I S in soft, juvenile curves on the torn book cover I’d fashioned out of a brown paper grocery bag.

I vaguely remembered throwing it there somewhat hastily. I had been doing my homework when a sense of urgency struck and I realized I had not written him as I promised I would and glancing at the clock, I noted it was nine-twenty-three. Why that mattered I had no way of knowing in that strange moment, but within hours, it would be one I would never forget; and although I was becoming drowsy and still needed to finish my work, I felt beyond reason that my letter to him could not wait.

So, I wrote. I would always write. I would always be there. He would always be there.“Suzi."It was my name spoken in the smooth and familiar voice of my mother, although weighted and slow, her head bowed to her chest almost as though she were speaking only to herself.

"Suzi.” She said it again, this time with sharp gravity, like a chisel against stone.

As if on cue, I leaned forward, flanked now by my parents who were sitting on either side of my bed.

I had been waiting for them. I don’t know how. I didn’t know why. The lights in my room remained off, but it seemed that the darkness clung more to them than to me, as though they were holding it there – away from me to give me enough light to see through the next moment. They were crying. My father was crying. My father. “Suzi. We have something very, very bad to tell you." Chris has been in a car accident." And he was killed."

If the world moved forward from that moment, I could not know it. f there were air around me worth breathing, I could not take it in. And if there were another sound beyond the leaden bellow of my own raw grief, I could not hear it.

"Who am I going to talk to? Who am I going to love?” I wailed. Who will love me? In that sodden moment violated by the intrusion of a predawn light that had no business rising, everything I ever believed about happiness, hoped for in life, trusted in or held as my own was annihilated.

After that – there was no after that. After that came months of hollow redundancies that would inform my way of being in the world for years to come. A serial commitment to waking up each morning, remembering he was gone and dedicating the remaining hours to forgetting. To that end I would try anything, drink anything, ingest anything, inject anything. It was a slow and arbitrary suicide by indifference.

Many years later, at 25 years-old and in the midst of a pharmaceutical free-fall leaning dangerously close to terminal, I discovered that I was expecting a child, and after a decade of forgetting, I remembered. I named him Griffin after the legendary winged lion, a symbol of the divine because what he inspired and the miracle that he was, were nothing less. I remembered and I loved again, and I went on to marry and to the gift of two beautiful daughters.

Today my son is struggling not to drown in the same well of drug abuse and apathy that almost swallowed me – his great, divine wings clipped by his own hand; and while it is up to him to restore his place in the sky, I will do my best to help provide an open runway.

In the meantime, I will continue soaring for both of us; bequeathed as I have been, with a determination to fly from a boy whose ragged fate precluded that dream.

Death took one young man from me once upon a dark time. If it has any intention of coming for this one, it will have to go through me. And trust me, it will be in for one hell of a fight.

Note: If you enjoy this article, please let me know.

Friday, December 23, 2011

Am I a Born or Made Writer?

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