Why I Write:
I still like throwing coconut bombs at pirates.
Let me explain.
Once, when I was in the first grade, I got so sick that I was out of school for an entire week. My parents had just bought a Disney movie I had never before seen, and with nothing else to do except sleep, drink ginger ale, and eat soup, I decided to pop it into the VCR.
Over 20 years later, I still remember. I remember the shipwreck, the salvage of the piano, the captive boy who turned out to be a girl over whom the two brothers fought. How I longed to have a tree house just like that family and race ostriches through the jungle! How I wished I could be the kid who captured the tiger and threw coconut bombs over the rock ledge at pirates who had discovered them and given chase.
I watched the movie every day that week, and as the week went on, the couch upon which I laid in my parents’ dreary shag-carpeted TV room was transformed into an undiscovered island all to my own. Hours after the film had ended, the story had still continued, as I’d map out the scenes from “my treetop sanctuary” on the couch. Since the story lacked a daughter in the family, I wrote one in my head: I played the role of Francie, the youngest boy’s twin sister, who trapped not one but TWO tigers AND a lion and whom the whole world never met because she only existed in my version of the story.
After three days of this, my mother finally threw up her hands and asked why I had to throw my wads of tissues on the floor at the lineup of stuff animals below the couch instead of in the wastebasket. Still on my imaginary island, I looked to where she was pointing and saw only the coconut bombs I had hurled at the pirates advancing on the shore below my hideout beneath a palm tree.
I loved my newfound undiscovered island, but mostly, I loved that I could become anything and anyone while I was there, writing new villans and plot points in my head to extend the story.
As the years progressed, my “imagination island” transformed from the couch in my parents’ TV room to filling the blank pages of journals, notebooks, computer screens, and even iPhones with adventures untold. Many times, I wished for others to be able to join in on my adventures, but the confident "Francie" who was unafraid of failure was not a true reflection of the writer who had conceived her, and so my stories remained trapped in the pages of the binders in which they were written, unseen by any but me.
And with the pressures of a demanding job in New York City's Mayor's Office followed by a full-time gig as teacher/chef/event planner/chauffeur/housecleaner/butt-wiper to my two boys, for years my dream of publishing seemed marooned on the very island that once helped spark its start.
And lost to an island is where this dream may have remained forever were it not for something that happened as my eldest son turned 4 years-old. He had been requesting more and more of "Mommy's stories" in lieu of one from a book at bedtime. "Mommy," he said to me one evening after I finished telling him another bedtime story, this one about a band of pirates celebrating Christmas in a cave (the three elements he had requested for said story). "You are really good at telling stories. I mean it. You should write them down so that other kids can read them!"
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With my son's push from shore, I boldly rowed my raft back to my island, scooped up my dream to share my stories with others, and, with newfound confidence, begain throwing coconut bombs at pirates again.
And I'm realizing something I share with my character Francie that I never before believed:
I have pretty good aim.