What Makes A Writer?

What makes a writer?

By John W. Vander Velden 

I guess I can’t honestly answer that question. I have no way of knowing what drives others to write. But I can speak for myself. What makes John W. Vander Velden a writer? If you have gone to my bio page you will have read the first clue. John is a lifelong storyteller. And I am. I do not know what drove me to create stories, but my imagination has been a powerful force within my mind as long as I can remember. I wrote a series of Blog posts on storytelling and how it has changed even during my lifetime. I may post a few here on some later date. But this is not some ramblings about the changes in storytelling; it is a bit of rambling about me as an author.

Imagination creates scenarios, but storytelling is shaping those rough concepts into something logical enough that others can share that world with you.

Storytelling does not a writer make…on its own. But it helps.

I had difficulty in the mechanics of my language…English.  It was that difficulty that stood in the way of putting my stories down on paper. Memories of high school pages drenched in red ink stood as a wall between me and the page. Those images drove a feeling of inadequacy that held me hostage. But, to my good fortune and perhaps yours as well, things happen in life that changed my perspective. The first was reading a series of books and feeling the story, though long, was incomplete. I began writing a sequel in the late seventies. Each day I wrote page after page in long hand. I filled several spirals with my absolutely awful handwriting. The result more than 1300 pages of mostly drivel. But I learned I could tell a story.

Then a story came to me in the late eighties, “The Second Life of Joshua Smith”. I have not penned a single word from that tale. But it built much like a serial, day after day, the story of a man that much like Job lost everything and the life he build following that disaster. Even as I worked at my regular job, if I happened upon a dull moment, a scene would play out in my mind. It was fortunate at those time I worked alone, for it would have been difficult to explain the tears. That was a new experience, to be emotionally moved by my own story.

Those things and the access to a word processor gave me the courage… to write. It occurred to me that I might not know all the mechanics, but I could hire someone to repair my mistakes. And red ink or not, NO ONE could tell my stories better than me. And so in 1999 or 2000 I began writing my stories and I haven’t stopped yet.

(475 Words)  3-15-2019