Lost in the Odyssey

Okay, so sticking with some more “sprinkled” details, as one of my mentors would say, I was encouraged to fit my blabbing’s around some central theme. Like skin on a skeleton. No matter what you do, it will fall off with time. 🙂

To answer the question Haley posed to me, what did I read when I knew I wanted to write.

This has two answers.

When I was sixteen, my class read Homer’s Odyssey and I was consumed with such a tale of adventure. We were then asked to write our own odyssey, of sorts. Sixteen pages, or a page a year about our lives. I was in AP English so don’t worry. The assumption was we could, or should, be able to complete this.

I can never tell this story with a straight face.

My teacher, Mrs. Pamela Hughes, stared at me like I had just kicked her in the shin. “I don’t think you understood the assignment.”

I was already not in agreement. I wasn’t totally dumbstruck from being on the line in football, but she shook her head.

“Everyone wrote about their earliest memories, starting school, sports, family vacations, and those sorts of things.”

She glared, sliding me my stack of sixteen pages.

“You expect me to believe this?”

I shook my head. “I thought I’d spice it up. Make it fun.”

And that made her laugh. Or smile. A smile is after all just a laugh trying to keep hidden.

In my odyssey, I was an assassin, orphaned, who was recruited to a school where I was trained to fight from the age of five. There were parallels to my real life! But there were also grenades, and swords and villains a plenty!

She still gave me an “A.”

Or a high “B.”

The second was when I took my first writing course in college. In all honesty, I didn’t know what I wanted to do my first year as a fulltime college student. My writing professor, Dr. Marilyn Wilton, assigned our first writing assignment and I wrote an X-Men rip-off about me and my sisters as mutants with powers in Boston.

It was terrible.

But Dr. Wilton’s ability to see through the atrocious dialogue tags and grammar from hell offered me something I had never received before: she found what she liked and didn’t like and told me to go and fix it.

Both felt so good, notes and praise.

And the flint was lit, spoon held aloft, and I felt the first real satisfaction of sharing my (terrible) fiction with others.

So, I didn’t answer the second part and just got lost in talking, which happens.