Well, I've been registered on these boards since August 2005, and yet I've posted no more than a single story here during all this time, a vignette at that. So why don't I write more?
But I do. I've written some 245 posts here since I became registered, most of them relatively lengthy ones. So why do I write comments on other people's stories, as well as various kinds of other musings, instead of writing stories of my own?
When I was a kid, I wasn't a natural writer at first, but I always loved stories. The best moments I had with my father was when he and I sat down and started to tell a story together: He started, I continued, he told the next part etcetera. The story just went on and on and became wilder and wilder, and I remember I would often laugh hysterically. When I was alone in my room, I would often tell myself stories, and my mother has told me that she sometimes stood outside my door, listening. But I never wrote the stories down, even when I became good at writing. I found that writing it actually killed the story, because it took such a long time to do it that the story stopped dead in its tracks as I tried to analyse it and translate it into letters and words and sentences and write it all down on paper. By the time I was done writing down the first part, the story refused to take flight any more, and I had to abandon it. I illustrated my stories instead, and I filled sketchpad after sketchpad with illustrations of the stories that never existed outside my own imagination.
My need to write didn't come from a wish to immortalize my stories, but from the darker and more troubling aspects of my childhood. Particularly the ominous and contradictory rules and commandments of religion. Growing up between two religious groups, one liberal and one fundamentalist, and being threatened by the fundamentalists that Jesus would come back any day or night now and bring his faithful ones to heaven and leave the rest behind, caused me a lot of anxiety and worry. And the problem was that I couldn't talk to anybody about my fears and doubts. If I had asked the fundamentalists, they would have been horrified beyond belief that I harboured such doubts at all, and I trembled at the very thought of what they might do to me if I let them see my doubts. And even trying to get reassurance from my liberal parents wouldn't really have solved anything. How could I know that my parents were right and my relatives were wrong? I once asked my mother if I had to believe in everything in the Bible, and she told me that I didn't have to do that. Well, that was a relief... until I realized that in order to be fully reassured, I would have to ask her exactly what parts of the Bible I had to believe in and what parts I could dismiss, and how I could tell the difference between them. And I knew, even as a young kid, that I couldn't ask my mother that, because she would not be able to answer, and she would be uncomfortable that I had even asked. In fact, I couldn't think of a single religious person that I could talk to seriously about religious questions, someone who wouldn't be upset and wouldn't ignore the intellectual challenge behind the questions and wouldn't try to turn me into a good Christian child who didn't ask such stupid questions. And as for trying to talk to the non-religious people I knew, well, they would just have laughed at me.
So I could talk to nobody, and that meant that I started thinking a lot. I became a thinking child. And while I always found it frustrating to try to hold down and write down the beautiful butterfly of a story (and tear rips in its wings) instead of letting it flitter freely, unfettered by paper and pen, wherever it wanted to, I found, by contrast, that it was often a very good thing to write down my thoughts about the things I was mulling over and trying to figure out. Writing these things down made it so much easier to sort out my own thoughts. And it was a good thing that writing it down took time, because that gave me more time to think and clarify my own thoughts and position on a question, if not necessarily to come up with an answer.
So I started writing down my thoughts, and found it a very satisfying way of thinking. I just did it, naturally and for my own sake, more and more. And the need to write stories - to write stories - which I'd never really had in the first place, disappeared even more.
But I'll confess two things. The first thing is that for years, I was telling myself "Spock stories", well, stories about Spock of Star Trek and the Enterprise, obviously. This man totally, totally fascinated when I first saw him on TV as a teenager, but I wanted him to break out of his shell, to become more confident in himself, and to be able to live and love. That never happened, so after a couple of years, I started telling my own stories of how it did happen. Well, you know, when a story that you want to read doesn't exist, then you have to write it yourself! Except that I never wrote down any of my Spock stories. Not a single one of them. Eventually, I had perfected the Spock stories to the point where Spock was such a marvel of altruism and god-like love (yes, I have to admit it), that the only place he could go from where I'd put him was into the arms of death, to sacrifice his life for the greater good of humanity and other sentient life forms of the universe! So I made him do that, and my only excuse is that I didn't resurrect him or let the rest of the sentient beings of the universe gain eternal life because of him! But as you may imagine, that was the end of the Spock stories for me.
As I said, I never wrote any of the Spock stories down. But now on to my second confession. Seven or eight years ago a Lois and Clark fan, whom I've since lost contact with, sent me a bunch of LNC fanfic stories, which I have similarly misplaced (it has definitely something to do with my getting a new computer since then). Well, I was sufficiently inspired by these stories that a Lois and Clark story of my own just came to me and lodged itself in my mind, and eventually, I decided to write it down. And all I can say about the result is.... Shudder! Groan! That written-down version of the beautiful story that had been floating around in my head came out so badly, so embarrassingly, that it killed the beautiful non-written version of it. Not only that. I was so embarrassed that I felt uncomfortable about the entire concept of Lois and Clark for a while, as if my own botched attempt to write a story about them had actually blighted them for me. And so it happened that while I could have become an official member of a Lois and Clark site in 1997 or '98, I didn't find it in myself to actually reach out to a site like this one until the summer of last year.
And that, I guess, pretty much sums what I write and what I don't write, and why I write what I write and don't write what I don't write. But, who knows. I guess I may still write another Lois and Clark story, and hopefully I won't feel too embarrassed about anything I might write about them and post here in the future.
Ann
