Inspirations IV - A Personal Insight into Writing by Patricia Lloyd

    When I was a kid I saw this handwriting machine while on a school field trip. You signed your name on a piece of paper and fed it into the machine and it gave you a printout of your personality traits. I know, not very scientific but I was a kid and I thought it was loads of fun.

    It said I had an overactive imagination, and scientific or not it was very accurate. I was an avid reader and devoured books like Call of the Wild, Where the Red Fern Grows, and The Black Stallion. Most of them were stories about animals but there were a few others thrown into the mix.

    These stories whisked me away from my average childhood and took me to places I was never likely to visit, stories set in times long gone and stories of people who never were. I felt the scorching heat of the Arabian desert, the excitement of the Klondike gold rush, and saw a red dragon asleep on a hoard of stolen treasure.

    My love of a good book eventually made me dream of being the one who wrote the story. I wanted to make a reader forget who they were for a few minutes. I wanted to lift someone out of their ordinary life and introduce them to a world they’d never dreamed of, full of characters they’d only meet between the pages of a book.

    Ah, but how to do that? It’s so much easier to think of a story idea than it is to wrestle my thoughts into submission and get them down on paper. I can’t share my stories if they never leave my head so sometimes I think of it this way – if someone conked me on the head and I lost my memory, which stories would still be around? The only ones that would be left are the stories that I actually wrote down.

    So I sit down in front of my computer with a hot cup of tea and transform my ideas into tangible sentences. I string those sentences together to make enough paragraphs to fill a page, and enough pages to make an entire story. Now I can be the bridge for someone else to cross over into new and exciting worlds. All they have to do is open the cover of a book and turn the page.