Fly

Today I'm participating in a blog hop called The Courage to Fly, put together by Stephey Baker at Marked by the Muse. There are lots of great posts by people musing about creativity, art, inspiration, dreaming and courage!  If like me you like to meet fellow dreamers and thinkers, go check it out!

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If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, you must be the one to write it. - Toni Morrison

Why do I dream of being a writer?  That part is easy.  Don't we all dream of something?  I've always loved stories and books and what I love filled my dreams.

But for all my dreams of being a writer, most of my life I've been a dabbler.  Journals full of scrap phrases and shiny words, awkward doodles and poetry.  Half-finished short stories.  Poems published in high school and college journals and handed out to friends in homemade booklets.  A painful first attempt at a novel more than a decade ago.

I thought, perhaps this writer thing would always only ever be a dream, and it was becoming a faded one at that, like the old quilts made by my great-aunts from flour sacks, the colors faded in the sun.

But then, the dream came again.  And this time with urgency.  Was I braver than before?  Yes.  More determined? Yes.  But why? More than anything, what I wanted was to bring my story to life.

It started one night, watching an old movie.  It was simple. I had an image.  Two lovers in the snow, dancing around the truth between them.  And I wanted to make it real.  To make it into something I could see and others could see. Since then there have been other images, other inspirations and bolts from the blue and I've followed them down the twisty paths as they beckoned me.

What made the difference between dreaming of being a writer, and actually becoming one?  I think the moment came when I listened to that voice inside me, the creative stirring, and finally answered it instead of turned it away.

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Please go visit my fellow Courage to Fly blog hopper today at: http://bonesigharts.blogspot.com/2011/03/stepheys-blog-hop.html