Love of Writing

As long as I can remember, I have loved to write. I’m not sure if I was born with that passion or if it developed over time with encouragement from adults in my life. Writing was never presented to me as a chore; instead, it was suggested or assigned as a fun project.

I grew up in an age of imagination. As children, our activities were unstructured and we spent a great deal of time in the world of make believe. We created our own fantasy worlds in which we pretended all day long. Parents and teachers did not rescue us from any boredom that we may have experienced. We were just left to figure it out for ourselves and often did so, reverting to our worlds of make believe. As an adult, I now realize that was a gift.

My parents did not overtly encourage my writing, but they made sure that plenty of paper and pencils were readily available. Writing paraphernalia could be found all over the house. Putting pen to paper was not considered something that happened in a set location, but could occur anywhere. For a birthday present one year, I was given a leather-bound diary, complete with lock and key. This was a very special present—a place where I could record my most secret thoughts. When we went away on vacations, my mother would remind me that my grandmother enjoyed receiving my letters. Mom made this activity fun by making sure that I always had an ample supply of stationery of my own choosing. If postcards were to be sent, I was allowed to pick those out as well. The decorations on the stationery and the pictures on the cards often suggested subjects about which I might tell my grandmother.

In school, we were encouraged to write stories. I have no recollection of how these were evaluated, but I don’t remember getting any assignments back with lots of marks. Many times, we were given one-sentence story starters. It was fun to see how fellow students would take those single sentences in so many different directions.

My favorite writing project took place in junior high. Miss Johnson was my English teacher. She was very tall and her toes pointed out at angles giving her a bit of a duck walk. She had a strong, mellow voice, never smiled, and was very strict, but always fair. Miss Johnson made diagramming sentences fun, and in late October, just before Halloween, she would read us Edgar Allan Poe stories. One day Miss Johnson posted Norman Rockwell pictures from The Saturday Evening Post all around the room. For those of you too young to remember, the cover of each issue of the magazine featured a Norman Rockwell illustration that told a story about every day life. The pictures elicited all kinds of questions about what happened before and after the related incident. We students were allowed to choose any picture we wanted and write a story about it.

I was also pleased (elementary school through graduate school) each time I was assigned a research project. I have always enjoyed discovering new information, learning about various resources, and organizing my learning in new ways.

In elementary school, I became interested in pen pals. It was fun to find out about different cultures and to correspond with boys and girls from foreign lands. Many of these were children learning English as a second or third or fourth language. I collected pen pals in a variety of ways. My aunt was in contact with some of our relatives in Norway and gave me the addresses of two shirttail cousins from the old country. There were also some organizations that connected student pen pals in different lands. By the time I was in high school, I had almost 20 pen pals. I could hardly wait to get home each day to see what mail had arrived. Writing to all these people also piqued my interested in stamp collecting, as the letters I received were often filled with colorful, exotic squares, rectangles, and sometimes triangles from abroad. Mr. Salisbury, an elderly friend who took me under his wing, continued corresponding with pen pals and stamp collecting for his entire life. (He sent me his duplicate stamps for my collection.) I was fascinated because, as an adult, he traveled the world and visited all of the people he had written since childhood.

So, I’m not sure if the love of writing is inherent or taught. I do know that there are many ways that adults can encourage writing by providing the tools and opportunities and also presenting it as a fun activity. My experiences growing up list just a few of these.