What One Person Can Do

I grew up in a family of storytellers. My mother, who has a knack for making friends with just about everyone she meets, and my father, who spent 25 years in the Navy, provided plenty of material. Ideas, characters, and plots rattled around in my head.

I enjoyed English classes, and I wrote short stories. Then I graduated and stopped writing for the sheer enjoyment of it. Over my adult career my writing consisted of news items, press releases, some magazine articles, and more marketing collateral than I ever thought possible.

Sometimes I would start a story but it they were horrible, and I gave up. By that point I didn’t know how to write creatively anymore. It was a part of me that had grown rusty from disuse.

Then, in 2004, my brother moved in with me.

He thought it was ridiculous that I wasn’t writing. Of course I should be writing, and I should be writing what I wanted to write. He encouraged me to do NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writing Month. He gave me Stephen King’s On Writing. If someone called me while I was writing he told him or her I wasn’t available to talk. He honored the space I had to carve out of life to write. He never, not once, made me feel that the time I devoted to writing was wasted. He always encouraged. He still does.

I’m on my third manuscript now. The first two were cruddy, but that’s okay. It took me a while to figure out what I was doing and what I wanted to write. This one, though, might have a chance of seeing the light of day. But I wouldn’t have thought it was possible if it weren’t for him.

So today, on his birthday, I just want to say thanks for believing. It’s made a huge difference in my life.