The greed of creativity

Growing up I was early in discovering how much fun I had just around words. My own unabated curiosity blackmailed my parents into teaching me how to read: it was so mysterious to see my father looking at the newspaper and learning stories by simply looking at the letters that I was very determined to learn how to do it. So it turns out that, by the time I started preschool at age 4 and a half (I know they were different times) I was confidently reading words, writing my name and other similar feats. This followed on to reading, also at a quite early age, many of the young-adult classics of the time, such as Jules Verne, Emilio Salgari, Herman Melville or Mark Twain, late into the night and at a great expense in batteries, which seemed to just die the moment they entered my torch.

But the curiosity was not limited to the act of deciphering the writing: I was equally attracted by the sheer variety of the words, the families they build, their resemblances and differences, the nuances and the inaccuracies of the language. Of course, reading a lot and from a wide spectrum of themes netted me from very young a vocabulary that widely exceeded my age. By some accounts I was openly insufferable, but what can I say, it is hard enough to have a good command of the language, you are not going to ask for a clear understanding of the social relations.

Photo: mpclemens

Soon enough I also realized that I derive an incredible amount of pleasure from weaving stories together. I have to admit that sometimes I had a hard time stopping at the border of reality and I ended up telling as certain events and facts that never took place. I could not help myself just watching the faces of my audience transported by the narration I had just put together with a few distant pieces of my own experience and a lot of imagination. I cannot vouch for my credibility, but I can legitimately say that I seemed to be able to grab their attention.

My actual writing career probably started around 1991, when my father bought a PC to write his thesis and I found a means to turn my stories into readable material. My head had always been bustling with ideas, but my poor handwriting was never a good vehicle to make my stories well known. However, now that there was a computer in the house and that my father even encouraged me to learn how to type and how to work on texts, I just found the missing piece of the puzzle. A couple of years earlier I had signed up at school for a course on touch typing, so after spending one hour per week for a whole year I had achieved quite a fluency on the keyboard. But I still had to wait for the computer, because the typewriter we had, a venerable Olivetti Lettera 32, just required too much correction tape for me to use reliably.

In 1993 I had an unexpected success in a literary contest with two short stories, which was the coronation to an epic senior high-school year: beside completing my GED, I also obtained the DL from Alliance Française for my knowledge of French, and scored in the top three of both the Physics and Math Olympiads at a local level. After that it was approximately eight years of quite intense production. I wrote many short stories and even a couple of novel, which never found any recognition in the literary circuits, but I continued to write, somehow in the guise of what I am doing right now, with few or no readers, but plowing ahead anyway.

All this preamble just brings me to the point I wanted to make today about how greedy creativity is. I do not know how it is for other writers, but when I am in the middle of incubating a story it sits on the back burner, but only apparently because, the moment I have an idea that bears any remote connection with the subject I am writing about, it comes back to the front and I have to give it some thought, at least to decide if it is pertinent to the idea or can be discarded. Karen could probably dis-authorize my opinion in the blink of an eye, but I picture it a bit as being pregnant: you continue with your life just as normal, but whenever your baby decides to play tricks you are automatically pulled back to the reality where you are pregnant.

It is likely that, once we return to the normal routine of going to the institute for work I will not have enough spare time to keep writing this daily blog, but until them I am gladly yielding to the greed of my creative side and putting this words together for you. I hope you enjoy. Have a nice evening.