To Write is to Live.....

In ninth grade creative writing class, I developed a somewhat unhealthy obsession with melo-drama that I never really got over. I think the instigator might have been the summer of the soaps when I seriously watched All My Children, One Life to Live and General Hospital everyday for two months straight. I was convinced that something life-shattering was going to happen to me just like when Karen Wexler became addicted to pills and a stripper at Sonny's club; or when Marty was gang-banged by a group of drunken frat boys (except Kevin, who felt bad about it and I think later, ended up dating Marty for a while). And instead of being afraid or even worried about what impending travails were ahead of me. I daydreamed about it. I wrote long-winded over-wrought short stories about it.

Everyone has their share of bad teenage angst poetry but how many of us can lay claim to melo-dramatic 'Fear Street' rip-off short stories always staring themselves as the victim/protagonist who repeatedly dies at the end of the 500-word soapy narrative?

My writing teacher started to get a bit concerned. He was also the school guidance counsellor. So he asked me about them and with a little prodding I conceded that my hum-drum life was far too basic and pedestrian for anyone to take interest in. That's when the hippie teacher dropped some of his hard-earned knowledge.

"To write is to live," he said. "And when you have a writer's soul, and believe me, you do, you won't have to sit down and write, one day it will all come out of you uncontrollably."

That has stuck with me longer than anything else I have ever learned. Now I think my naive writing teacher might have underestimated my powers of procrastination and the depths of apathy that lie beneath my cheery exterior, but his message remains the mantra that i whisper to myself when I feel down about my lack of productivity. Through the clouds and beneath the muddy confines of my befuddled mind, there is a Governor General's award waiting to happen. I just have to look for it.... tomorrow.