Guest Post: M J Henry - Something to Think About: Why Do You Write?

When I was a kid, growing up in a small Texas town, I found that when I wrote my “stories” I would have a large audience on the playground any day after lunch. All I had to do was to bring my most recent chapter to read. I guess I really liked the feeling of importance. More than that, I really liked the feeling I got while I was putting my thoughts on paper. This phenomenon continued through junior high school and high school. I would write and share; but I never saved anything.

Growing

How I wish I still had those early stories to read now. What a difference I would see; what growth I would identify. Those early stories, I remember, were along the lines of the Nancy Drew mysteries. I think I saw myself as a great mystery writer. By the time I was in high school, I think I had graduated into some of the stranger stories similar to what I write now.

 After I became an adult I only remember writing a few more things. I wrote one story based on a recurring nightmare I had as a child. This, I wrote at the suggestion of a counselor. Through the writing of this story and a charcoal drawing I did that illustrated it, I was able to write my way through the pains of my childhood. Later, after the earliest Star Wars movie and the first Star Trek movie came out I wrote a sci-fi for my kids. Again I had an audience to listen as each chapter emerged. I found it to be a way to draw my kids and me closer together.

Life Got In The Way

After that I put my writing aside for a very long time. Life got in the way as it always seems to do. I told myself that I didn’t have time to write. That, however, would have been the perfect time to write. When your kids are growing up there are always so many funny things and so many sweet things that they do. Now I have to rely on a faulty memory to get them down on paper; and there are a few things that I feel are worth doing just that. I only hope that I can remember the details well enough to turn them into stories before I can no longer remember at all.

Now, here I am, retired and needing something to fill my time. I went the FaceBook virtual farming route for a while. There is just so much virtual farming a person can do. It’s not like you’re going to take your virtual veggies and make a virtual salad, so you can invite your virtual friends to a virtual feast after virtual church. After a while it gets virtually boring.

Looking Back

So why do I write now? Because I’m a virtual nut case. Okay; maybe I’m just a little obsessive and somewhat creative. Writing is something that I have been storing up inside of me for a number of years. I stored it so long that the silos of my heart and my mind were about to burst open and spill all the grain it had stored up onto a virtual field; I like to think of it as a field of Texas bluebonnets. These silos are splitting at the seams now and the stories are steadily seeping out. It’s all that I can do to scoop them up and pour them out onto my laptop.

Why Do You Write?

Go on, ask yourself this question. What makes you put things on paper? It might be a hard question to answer but it is an important one. We should all, at some point, take a look at ourselves to find out what really motivates us to write in order to better understand our writing. Is it something that you have always done? Why? If you were told that you could never write another thing what would you do? I think that I would have to go on writing anyway, no matter what the consequences.

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About M J Henry

M J Henry is a 64 year old, native Texan. She has raised three children and is both a grandmother and a great-grandmother. Having written all her life as a release for her creative talent, she now writes stories of the strange and sometimes macabre. As a retired social worker, with nothing better to do, she looks to her writing as a release for lots of ideas she has cluttering her brain and screaming to get out.

M J has written a number of articles that have been published both in print and on-line. Print articles have been published in the December 2013 issue of Good Old Days Magazine and in the anthology Heartscapes, published by Spruce Mountain Press.She writes strange short stories along the line of "Twilight Zone" and "Outer Limits", children's stories, non-fiction articles and novels. So far, she has published, through Amazon Direct Publishing, the first of her AGELESS series, The Vampire’s Journals, her Collected Short Stories, and a novella titled The Trees Have Eyes.