As a writer now living in the tropics, I sometimes wonder how I ever got here. I often feel something similar while writing a novel or long story, banging on the keys for hours. I begin to imagine myself a kayaker moving fast down a river that shrinks into a creek and I stop paddling when I am stuck on a mound of sand in the middle of a desert, and I ask: How did I get here?
As a boy fishing at a Minnesota creek near my home, I wondered where that creek might take me. I began to dream of exotic and far away places where I could be carried away on a raft, sucked through that dreaded snake-filled swamp that tossed me out into the big river. From there I was free to dream of every adventure, of any place on earth I wanted to be.
I never had a yearning to be a writer. A dreamer and a thinker? Yes. Since then I learned that writers and thinkers are so similar in many ways. We are all searching. Writers search for a more meaningful word, a symbol to hang our hats on, an idea that reaches up to make more sense of a meaningless world. That is where thinkers and writers are the same. As writers, often it is not our characters who are lost…it is us.
If you care to share a story of your own, please write to me below (‘Get in Touch’).
