There are some really awesome writers out there in the blogosphere. Alternatively, there are also some really lousy writers who saw one too many episodes of Carrie Bradshaw waxing eloquent about sex and her single girlfriends and thought “HEY I CAN DO THAT!” But we won’t get into that.

When I went to the annual BlogHer conference last summer, I was new to blogging and shocked at what a phenomenon it had apparently become while I wasn’t looking. I’ve considered myself to be a “writer,” whatever that term may mean, since I was in fifth grade and used to hole up in the loft of my family’s townhouse on my dad’s ancient Gateway and write 20-page novels about beautiful housewives and their perfect families and houses with white picket fences (I’m sure my imagination blows you away).

When I was in high school I had two amazing English teachers, one being Ms. Sisson, who told us my sophomore year that the most important thing to remember when writing was to keep it short and to the point. “I would rather read a short, bad essay than a long bad essay,” she would tell us. The second was my creative writing teacher and a trusted mentor whose passion for language and expression remains unparalleled to me to this day. He relinquished the creative side of the written word – what your characters might be thinking, feeling, seeing – be it fiction or non-fiction.

Mr. Anagbo challenged his students to care about what we were writing – he didn’t assign busy work for the sake of the curriculum but he would share poetry, short stories and essays that inspired him with hopes that we would cling to the words as impetus for our own work. If you were late to class, he didn’t penalize you academically, but you could expect to feel guilty for being such a slacker. Because of his lax attendance policy, students may have taken advantage of him, but I felt even more compelled to succeed against his unconventional challenges and creative style of teaching.

He towered well over six feet and spoke with a thick accent from his native country in Africa, but that didn’t stop him from singing Backstreet Boys tunes and calling his favorite mantra down the hallway to some of his unrulier students: “no smoking in the bathroom!” regardless of whether or not smoking in the bathroom was actually taking place.

As much as I always loved to write, I was never certain if the words that I churned out were any good. Would people want to read them? Did anyone besides my parents find it endearing that while some pre-adolescent girls dreamt about their white wedding gowns and honeymoons, I was mentally plotting my book tour and wondering if I would look as cool as Ann M. Martin did when I visited Barnes & Noble in the fourth grade so that she could sign my copy of the latest Babysitters Club book.

I had been emailing my friends WordPerfect documents, filled with the blather that I called fiction, pretty much ever since I learned how to email. “Are the characters believable?” I would ask. They had trendy names like Tyler and Morgan and Madison and they were always attractive. “OMG yes!” was always a typical response, and whether sincere or genuine, I’ll never know.

During my senior year in high school, I turned to writing after a tumultuous several months with the first boy who told me he loved me. I used a black and white marble composition book to jot down song lyrics that I liked or paragraphs that came to me when I was driving home from work at the café that I managed on the weekends, not as an outlet for your typical teen angst, but as a distraction from real life events that I didn’t like. If I could create the perfect relationship or the perfect best friend on paper, than it had to exist somewhere and one day I would find it.

It was during this point that I wrote my first good short story. I define “good” based on the pride that I felt about it. I felt like I knew the characters and when I wrote their dialogue, I could hear them speak. It was also the first time I had used a swear word in my writing for school – but I didn’t care if it was inappropriate since I knew that is what my character would have said.

“This,” said Mr. Anagbo after he read the story, “is real passion.” I had never thought of writing as being a passion – everyone I knew wrote at least something every day but his words motivated me to keep doing exactly what I was doing – and last summer, at BlogHer, I realized that I’m not the only one out there with something to say. And even better? There are people out there who actually want to read it.

Tell me, who inspires you to put pen to paper, so to speak? Why do you blog? And what made you want to share your thoughts with the internet?

This entry was posted on Friday, January 23rd, 2009 at 8:47 am and is filed under maris thinks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.