{"id":1603,"date":"2012-02-13T15:38:09","date_gmt":"2012-02-13T20:38:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.old.caraghobrien.com\/book\/?p=1603"},"modified":"2012-12-04T13:16:45","modified_gmt":"2012-12-04T18:16:45","slug":"q-when-did-you-start-writing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/birthmarked\/q-when-did-you-start-writing\/","title":{"rendered":"Q. When Did You Start Writing?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"A.\u00a0 Seventh grade.\u00a0 Didn\u2019t everything start in seventh grade?\u00a0 I had no idea then which assignments might turn into habits or which habits would turn into life-long pursuits.\u00a0 If you had asked me, I might have told you I loved playing violin and drawing more than writing. True, I woke up early to read books before school, but I also enjoyed being in the school’s musicals.\u00a0 It was a big deal when our class had a roller skating party, and I proved a lot of math theorems, like the other seventh graders.\u00a0 I was often busy tending my two-year-old sister, whom I adored.\u00a0 We would sled until nightfall.\u00a0 Afterward, I might write a poem about the color of the snow, but I think everyone probably did.<\/p>\n

I doubt there was any special clue then that ages later I\u2019d be lying on my couch, writing books.\u00a0 It certainly didn\u2019t occur to me to be a writer.\u00a0 Mr. Sanborn passed out a pile of gray-blue journals and told us to fill a certain number of pages weekly, and he checked.\u00a0 That was all.\u00a0 Yet when I filled my journal, he gave me another and I filled that one, too.\u00a0 I\u2019d discovered something that mattered to me, something about telling secrets to myself, and over the years, writing and thinking became the same thing.<\/p>\n

These days I have two journals, one by my bedside where I add a few lines about the day each night before I go to sleep, and one on my computer where I go off at length whenever the urge strikes.\u00a0 I seldom go back to read what I\u2019ve written.\u00a0 That\u2019s not the point. \u00a0I write in my journal because, at the moment, it creates sense out of my world, and it invariable leaves me saner and more grounded than when I began. \u00a0I like doing it.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s worth remembering that not all writing has to be directed toward a deadline.\u00a0 It need not all earn credit, meet a quota, or get driven into a chute like prep for the CAPT test our 10th<\/sup> graders will soon be facing.\u00a0 I\u2019m all for paid writing–don\u2019t misunderstand me–but I know full well that the wrong directions, secrets, and lies have value, too.\u00a0 Imagine if we all could write for fun.\u00a0 Oh, wait. \u00a0We can.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A.\u00a0 Seventh grade.\u00a0 Didn\u2019t everything start in seventh grade?\u00a0 I had no idea then which assignments might turn into habits or which habits would turn into life-long pursuits.\u00a0 If you had asked me, I might have told you I loved playing violin and drawing more than writing. True, I woke up early to read books […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[256,37],"class_list":["post-1603","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-birthmarked","tag-childhood","tag-writing-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1603","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1603"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1603\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2498,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1603\/revisions\/2498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}