My fingers are flying across the computer keys, which click in a very satisfying manner as the story begins to form on the screen. Strings of words and symbols coalesce into a piece that will hopefully come to life for a person and generate a whole new world.
No, I am not coding a video game. I am writing a story.
I am in the element that truly keeps me content and truly happy. I sit here in my room, typing away on my computer, which has been home to so many of my ideas. It’s always been this way, although the situation might have been slightly different at times.
Even as a toddler, I would fill large sketchpads and notebooks with huge, poorly drawn and childish drawings and imagined words- they look like mere scribbles now, but they were stories that I told my mother every afternoon after I had finished them. These stories were often about my family on adventures of my own imagining…
Even then, I was writing about myself. Am I narcissistic, or what?
The true beginning, however, came in second grade. The teachers in charge that year had us type up our life stories and a little bit about our daily lives before putting a book in front of us and telling us to paste in the words and accompany them with hand-drawn pictures. I enthusiastically (and slowly) pecked out my story first on the school computer, and later on the computer at home. Once the writing was done, I clumsily cut out the type and pasted it into the book, which had a blank cloth cover, rather like a stark white piece of paper ready to be drawn on.
Drawings accompany the writing. They are crude drawings, drawn by my unsteady hand. The pages depict my large, kelly green duplex house, with cream-colored walls on the inside as other illustrations would show. The images show people that are simply drawn. They are almost stick figures with circles for heads and hands, rectangles for torsos, legs and arms. They represented and depicted the important people of my life, each with their own special quality: my dad with his glasses, my mom with her ponytail, and my tiny little baby sister, apparently swathed in blankets- but in actuality, a crayoned face poking out of a slightly crooked, not properly colored yellow oval.
The book has held up well over the years- I still flip through it every now and then when I find it sitting in some corner of my closet, gathering my dust. As I flip through it, I reflect on the innocence I had, the simplicity of my life then. I reflect on the change that came over me.
The innocent boy who I was- was not The Oddity Writer yet. It was only when he truly tried to master his art did he complete his transition.