Writing my life away...

I have a theory that people who talk a lot make the very best book writers. If I dug up every single report card, from each teacher I had in elementary school, they would all have one thing in common, and it had nothing to do with my grades. No, the noticeably similar attribute on each academic report would sit there looming in the citizenship column, “Hard worker, but talks excessively,” or “Talking interferes with progress,” or “Very talkative.” In school, talking was always a negative thing. So when I got older, I was self conscious about my habit, but did that minimize my gab? Apparently not. In college, I was nicknamed motor mouth and people often commented on my voice volume. By the time I was finished, I had accepted my talkativeness as a stubborn quality that was never going to change, I don’t think it was something that I quite loved about myself though, it just was kind of the way it was. While travelling, people continued to make comments about the amount of words that would spill out of my mouth, but something changed. In countries outside of the United States, people blamed my trait on being American; I refused to accept that as the truth. In fact, when I was told that I was talkative because I was American, I would defend my mannerism as a unique quality. I decided that having a lot to say was a gift to be cherished; the characteristic that everyone viewed as “the worst feature a person could possibly have,” was going to be the very thing that made me great.


In Australia, I wrote an entire book in one month. It hasn’t been published or edited, but I still wrote a book in thirty days. So at 25 years old, I have written a book, and whether or not it ever makes a single dollar, that’s already a huge accomplishment. Even though I grew up being the most talkative person I had ever encountered, I’m quite positive that there are many others in the world who could gab up a storm, so being talkative becomes nothing special. But if you took every individual who told long winded stories and asked how they made that attribute work for them, I don’t think many could answer, “I wrote a book by the time I was 25, and by the time I turn 26 I plan to have three done.” Please notice that I am not promising greatness, there is absolutely no guarantee that any person on the face of this planet will read one of my books, let alone pay money to buy it. But I wouldn’t let that stop me from writing them in a million years.

I’d say I’ve lived an unplanned life, sometimes it’s messy, and others it is exciting. I can declare with the deepest conviction though, that I am grateful for the way my life has turned out so far and I am interested to see where it goes from here. I know I want to write, so while I get to work on my second book, I’ll write all sorts of other nonsense here.