A Writer? Me?

I play with the idea of writing a book.

Over the years I have often looked into roleplaying.  Honestly, I roleplayed very little, but my sister and brother and many of the my friends have been very into Dungeons and Dragons and other roleplaying games. Whenever I look at their books, I am fascinated with the lengths they go in rolling up a character.  To me, characters that you love and identify with should be the basis of any good fiction.  I have always loved rolling up roleplaying characters.  This idea of turning characters into stories is something I have played with for many years.  Before I was classified as disabled, I had several characters that were settling into an interesting story.  Since I became disabled, though, it seems like my whole life, most everything I do in a day is all about assuaging my guilt.  People have no idea how much guilt I carry because of being on disability.  If I could stop feeling all this guilt, my personality disorder could actually help me write fiction if I could work it right.  I won't go all into it, but the problem I have helps me to empathize with different people.  I specialize in thinking out of the box, in putting on different ideas and personalities like pairs of clothes.  This can be a problem when it comes to dealing with life, but it might be ideal in writing fiction.  An author I read once, Andrew Greeley, wrote some good books (Lord of the Dance was a favorite) taking on a new point-of-view in each chapter.  I've always kept that in mind and thought that if I ever wrote a book, I'd try to do it that way.

Anyway.  I have some ideas and my brother (the real writer in the family) introduced me to a website called TVTropes, which specializes in helping writers come up with good stories.  Strangely, events are seeming to conspire to push me toward writing.  Being toothless and having a problem develop at the place I was volunteering, and other things are making me want to stay at home.  Looking at the things that I crochet and realizing that I don't think I really crochet all that well also makes me want to find some other way to try and justify my existence.  (Does that sound like a strange idea?  Doing something to justify my breathing the air and eating food and taking up space on this planet?  I'm always working to make myself worth something.  I guess I should just accept the worthiness that God has given me.  I'm working on that.)  

I don't know whether to write fiction or nonfiction, though.  Like I said, I have some fiction ideas, but I also have some nonfiction ideas.  John Graham was encouraging me to write for a while.  He makes money writing magazine articles on gardening.  If I followed His advice, I'd write about what I know and feel driven to study.  I can see myself writing articles for Christian magazines about how to apply the Bible that I love so much.

This post is so long that it might be a book.  Chuckle.  Thanks, Michele and Penny for the encouragement to write.  I'm gonna work on that, and I think that I'm going to enjoy it.  I've heard that writing is two percent inspiration and ninety-eight percent perspiration.  I can do the perspiration part if I can just continue to see writing as a possibility.  In college, twenty eight years ago, I wasn't a bad writer.  I was getting some encouragement along that line from my English professor.  That was a long, long time ago, though.  Today is a new day.  If God will help with the inspiration, I will try to keep going on the perspiration necessary to develop some stories and articles and whatever.