What Made Me Do It?

Today’s RTW is what made us pick up that pen, or laptop, the very first time and write.

I’ve been reading all my life. In High School Junior English class, a free read period, I picked up a romance novel on my teachers bookshelf and was hooked. The next 18 years were spent reading everything and anything I could get my hands on. I was hooked on the written word.

I had this tiny voice in the back of my head saying, “try it, you could write too” but every time I tried, I got so overwhelmed I would just freeze up and panic. Of course, I had been trying to write a historical novel, which has got to be one of the hardest to do because of all the research involved. Needless to say, I failed at that. Obviously I couldn’t do it. I wasn’t meant to be a writer, but that voice was always there, telling me I could.

Fast forward to 2008. Well, actually rewind for a second to 2005. I was living in PA with my hubs, 2 boys under 3 and we were making plans for my dad to build us a house on his land in Maine. Our house was for sale, and we couldn’t wait. This was around February. It was also the month that I got the call from my sister that my dad was in the hospital. They discovered Stage 5 lung cancer. It had already spread everywhere, including his brain. I went back home several times over the next few months, and we ended up buying my g-mas house in the same town as most of my family. Two weeks before we moved, 2 days after Christmas, my dad died. He was 56. Thankfully I was there and got to say goodbye.

So the point of all this is to give you that moment when I realized if I didn’t at least try, I’d never know. We don’t know what life brings us from day to day, and I don’t want another 35 years to go by and look back and say, “I wish I’d tried to write.”

So in 2008 I sat my butt in the chair and wrote. It wasn’t good, but it wasn’t bad either. The main point was that I did it. Once I knew I could, it got easier. The words poured out. I wrote more, found an agent, wrote some more, left that agent, found a new agent, wrote even more, and the driving force behind all of that is my dad.

I want to succeed for him. I want to make sure that when the end comes, I can say that I did everything I wanted to and chased my dreams. And I want to be able to dedicate my books to him, so every one else will know how much he meant to me.

How about you? What made you decide to just sit down and do it?