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WHY WRITE?
Published
online at http://christianauthorsnetwork.blogspot.com/
How did I get started
writing? I can’t remember a time when I didn’t write.
When I was a child my brother and cousins and I would play the ‘what if’ game,
constructing a fantasy world in which to play. We spent far more time building
our world than actually playing:
“What if I was a sheriff?”
“And I was a bad guy. . .”
“And you robbed a bank . . .”
“And you came after me . . .”
On and on we wrote our scenes alternating a line at a time, and might
construct a two-hour sentence with no punctuation at all. We didn’t know we
were writing a play or a short story, we were just playing together. I still
write the same way, asking myself “what if” this or “what if” that, and it
still works.
I loved the essay portion of English in school and did well at it. I hated
grammar and sentence structure and diagramming sentences, and did poorly at it.
Now I wish I had paid more attention. I wrote things for the school newspaper
in junior high and high school, and was ‘really published’ for the first time
in a state-wide high school poetry anthology. In college there was more than
enough writing to do, particularly with me working full time to support a
family.
But the words kept coming.
Always I had to be writing something. For many years I did chamber of commerce
management, and it used up my words; publicity, economic development proposals,
a weekly newspaper column in 4 different papers for over 17 years. I used it to
do some travel articles, and publish 4 non-fiction books aimed at the
profession. I was the editor of a monthly newsletter for each chamber I served,
and of the State Chamber newsletter in both
And the profession ate up my words.
Then my daughter needed me to help her on a family history for a school project
and that got me started. It was hard to let go of, and I found myself far more
interested in the family stories than in who begat whom. I found an old spool
of wire for a wire recorder and I finally found one of the old machines that
would play it. When we did get it to play well enough to see what was on
it, it turned out to be my great-grandfather telling stories of his days
scouting for the cavalry out of
I had to write it down.
Grandpa really told the stories well, the third in 6 generations of Irish
storytellers. He made me want to tell stories myself. My grandmother told them
too. She was a self admitted ‘scardy cat’ who would keep her children up at
night telling them stories while my grandfather worked the late shift. She
could take the simplest story and make it incredibly exciting.
Mother was the 4th
generation storyteller, telling ma-maw’s stories and building on them. She
wrote a story premise that I used to build one of my first books on. She got me
started wanting to write fiction. There is a 6th generation, my daughter has
been a journalist and columnist for a newspaper for many years, but that is
another story.
Telling stories is in my blood, I have to do it. My faith was also very
important to me and still is, so it was natural the two would coincide. How I
came to terms with the way I would use my writing for the Lord is also a full
story in itself, and if it’s something you want to know more about you can read
it at: http://www.terryburns.net/Testimony.htm.
For the purposes of this blog suffice to say I got the message, and a
little or a lot, my writing reflects my faith now.
Yet I really don’t want to be a writer.
What I want to do is tell my stories, to provide badly needed clean family
entertainment. To share just a little of my faith that can be encouragement or
inspiration to a believer, or to reach out and just arouse a spark of interest
in a non-believer, never preachy and always secondary to the story. Just tell
my stories, and if I could I would gather people up around big campfires and
relate tale after tale.
But that isn’t practical.
So I write my stories and I share my faith, and I work with publishers who help
me reach out to get them in front of more and more people. When you’re a 5th
generation Irish storyteller who is also a 4th generation
Blessings,
Terry Burns
www.terryburns.net