Writing and My Life by Laura Knight ©2005
Writing has been my best friend (diary), my therapist (emotional poetry), my altar ego (writing notes as a secret admirer) and an escape from reality (crafting the ideal world ). Writing helped to keep me sane during my preteen and teen years when every problem seemed a catastrophe. Writing gave my life meaning.
I wrote my first poem when I was twelve years old. We had just moved (again) and I sat in my music class waiting for the bell to ring. I wrote a poem about the boyfriend I left behind. I remember rereading it thinking, "That's not too bad". From then on I wrote poems about lost loves, trying to find love, being in love, and also quite a few about how miserable I felt. I have a three-ring binder full of poems.
The summer I was fourteen, I was extremely bored. My best friend at the time lived about fifteen miles away and I hadn't yet made friends at our newest house. So one sunny morning, I pulled out a school notebook with about fifty pages left in it and wrote a complete short story before dinner. I was so proud of myself! Of course the story lacks substance - it's about a girl who moves away from her friends but finds them again in college. The friends are in a band and they ask her to join the band as the lead singer. A double wedding ceremony cinches the happily ever after.
Once I wrote that story, I needed to write more. I loved creating these alternate realities based on people I knew. By the end of summer I left my friends out of my stories and created characters I'd like to meet. I wrote not only to develop a story, but to get to know my characters. I never had a more enjoyable summer.
Boredom wasn't my only inspiration. In my sophomore geometry class a cutie named Mark sat next to me. He was a year older than I was, but once he noticed I wrote poems instead of taking notes, he asked if he could read them. Some days he would make requests. He even asked for something happy one day (I had just broken up with my boyfriend so I had been writing sad poems) so I wrote about how the clouds looked like cotton candy. He liked it. Before I moved (again) I slipped him a poem I had written about him called The Sleeping Love (which you can read in the Poetry section of this website). I never discovered what he thought of it.
The following year at a small town school called Grandview, another cutie named Tyler sat next to me in my Algebra III class. Noticing my notes were actually poems, he, too, asked to read them. (I guess I wrote a lot of poems in math classes, but I got A's so my school work didn't suffer.) Then one day he asked why I never wrote anything happy. His question made me wonder when I would find another cheerful subject.
The answer came two years later. My boyfriend of one year, Greg, had a good friend, Donnovan, who was quiet, alluring, artistic, and irresistible. Greg and I argued almost daily so, yearning for romance, I decided to become a secret admirer one last time. (I had tried twice before, once in eighth grade and once in ninth, and failed miserably). By keeping my identity secret, if my quiet friend wasn't receptive, feelings could be spared. So, even though I was still dating my future-husband's good friend, I wrote sweet little poems to Donnovan and signed them, "your Secret Admirer". On my way home late at night I drove past his house and put them in his mailbox, one every couple of days. He surprised me one day when we were alone in Greg's living room by mentioning that he had a secret admirer. And then he recited for me, word for word, the first poem I wrote him, An Admirer (also in the Poetry section). I was so shocked by the fact that the object of my affection memorized my love poem that I nearly cried. It would be a year before we finally got together, but that day I knew I could love no other man. We were soul mates - I just had to figure out how to get him to realize that, too.
The beginning of our relationship ended my depressing poetry - I smiled so often my cheeks actually hurt. (It took me awhile to realize why my face hurt all the time - I wasn't used to smiling so much.) Now that I didn't need my writing to make it through my day, I could chase dreams. I even returned to my short-story writing and came up with scads of ideas. One of them became my first award-winning story, The Dragon Shop. I often wondered what a happy life was like - my imaginings never came close.
Being able to write creatively saved my life in many ways. No matter how often I moved (I changed schools twenty-two times) or how many friends I left behind or how many boyfriends came and went, I knew that I always had a notebook and a pen and that would see me through. Now that I can write for the pure joy of it I intend to share it with the world. And if I earn some money and awards while I'm at it, all the better.