Painting ‘Forest Nymph’ by Lisa Shambrook: 1994 (Please do not use)
Sometimes I wonder why I write…but the answer is easy; I write because I have to, if I didn’t I’d be lost… As highly-strung as I am, if I didn’t allow myself to escape in writing, I think I’d go quite mad…
So why do I write?
Escape… I write to escape. I free my imagination and let my fingers loose on the keyboard, and words come alive… Life sometimes gets too much and I can lose myself in another world, a world in which I choose what happens, unless my character dictates for me! Which brings me to my second reason:
Create… I can create worlds, lands, species, dragons, people, languages, situations, anything and everything. I can breathe life into creations, I can watch romances develop, sunsets fade, I can melt hearts, I can kill, I can raise the dead…nothing is forbidden and remember, creation of life is the ultimate human achievement.
Fiction… Stories have always filled my mind, seeking an outlet and I have to give in. I’ve had a wild imagination all my life. When assignments to write stories were given as homework, I would spend hours writing and would wait, with bated breath, for grades accompanying the latest 15 page story scrawled in my homework book! I love making up stories, I love seeing imaginative visions end up in print on a blank page…expanding and growing, metamorphosing into something more, something bigger…
Inspiration… from Enid Blyton to JRR Tolkien, inspiration has accompanied my reading. I spent my childhood lost in books, curled up on my bed, or in the corner of the lounge with my head buried in literature, feeding my love of words, descriptions and adventure. I hope my writing inspires others…isn’t that what we, writers, want? To inspire as we have been inspired? I hope…
Manipulation… maybe this goes along with creating…I love the ability to manipulate, to change things, to alter and decide. I’m a control freak, there’s no escaping that. I love writing for a person, a character who becomes dear to me, but one who cannot see where her life is going or what she will face after the next turn in the road… I can decide if she finds happiness or I can break her heart…but where I take her will help her grow, will change her and mould her…until, and sometimes it does happen, she controls me…and I have no choice but to take her forward to whatever comes next, whether I want to or not!
Discovery… I grow! I discover new things about me. I move and grow with my characters, I cry with them, and laugh, and shout, and argue. I get taken to places I’ve never known, and experience emotions as raw as my leads. They teach and I grow…
Consistency… I’ve kept a diary, a daily diary, since I was fourteen-years-old. Can’t miss a day…my OCD trait, well one of them! I added journals many years ago and discovered blogging just a year or two ago. Sharing secrets with a journal became a way of coping, a way of archiving, a way of saving my life. I pour out my heart and file it away, day by day, year by year…and I know that I am alive, I am living!
And finally… I write because I am compelled to do so… I write because it is in my soul, the need to put words on paper is a compulsion, part of my very being. When I am sad it consoles me, when I am broken it mends me, when I am happy it completes me, when I am in love it raises me higher than ever…writing is who I am, it’s what I do…I write to be me…
The Last Krystallos 