As I was sifting through old memorabilia, I came across a book I had written in fifth grade, called "Runaway Hearts." Here is the summary written in the jacket flap:
"Felicia's father died, and her mother married someone else. The trouble had just begun when Mazzy came back from her honeymoon. Jon, the new husband, had a serious problem on his hands. Felicia found out, but didn't dare tell anyone. Then, one night, the problem got really bad. Mazzy, Kenji, and Felicia ran away to Philadelphia. It was the real world that laid ahead of them. Then Felicia could save them all. She found she had special talents that she had never known she had before. Could these talents save her family? Might they take her to places she has never gone before?"
Basically, this black mom had married a white, abusive alcoholic man. They had to run away, and then Felicia found out she could draw and sell her work in an art museum. Apparently when I was young I wanted to write screenplays for Lifetime.
Talk about a flair for the dramatic (this is not my only story when I was younger with weighty content--I also wrote a story called "For the Love of the Lost, where a girl, Mae, dies of bulimia. I didn't have an eating disorder.). If I were the teacher of a student writing something like this, I would probably assume there were some serious issues at home. But there weren't for me. I remember just caring for injustice, and believing in redemption. I guess some things never change.
Part of the way that I'm wired is that I feel things very, very strongly. It is easy for me to imagine people's trials and suffering. Sometimes I can actually feel their pain. When they ache, I ache. Around this time that I was writing this story, I also struggled with the idea that my family would die in a car accident, so I set up many 'rituals' to try and prevent it from happening (here's more info about my condition if you are unfamiliar with OCD). It's both a blessing and a curse to imagine things so severely. On the one hand, I can be ridiculously compassionate. On the other hand, my worry can be disabling.
One thing I learned while attending my reunion this past weekend was that I love listening to people's stories. I don't care if I don't know you that well. I don't care if you're awkward. I don't care if you're slightly rude. I love it. I love to learn about you. And I tend to remember whatever you shared with me. Or at least, a lot of it. It took me a while to learn to just stop and listen. As one article that I read recently pointed out, "...you don’t know what other people know, and everyone, no matter who they are, knows things you don’t know. That makes them a lot more important than you — because they’re people you can learn from." I certainly can't say I'm perfect in this, but I'm striving to become better.
I've learned now, though, as a writer, to "write what you know." Well, life so far has given me plenty of experience to design some stories. But I hope they wouldn't become a made-for-TV movie; I'm gonna try to shoot for AMC- or HBO-quality. Or PBS if that means Downton Abbey.
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