I was telling a friend today who’s always only written for publication what the Slice of Life Community was like. So I wrote this to explain my relationship to writing, which is quite different from hers.
At some point I realized I have often/always? been writing. There's a scrap of paper I'm having trouble finding right now on which I wrote as a child: "My name is Sonia and I am 5 and a half. There is a boy, his name is Mark and he is 4. The baby is Carla, and she is 2. Mommy is 30 and Mr. Jaffe is 31." (yes, at 5 I wrote about my father as though he was a stranger.) I remember being 11 or 12, sitting in our car in town while my mother shopped, writing furiously in one of those black and white composition books about who knows what, because rereading it a year or so later, I was disgusted at my younger self and threw the notebook away. Did that a couple more times through high school, always throwing away. In 9th grade i wrote a very derivative short story about a girl who dressed up as a boy so she could do something interesting (this was a Western, she was a cowboy on a ranch; I had been reading Zane Grey). When she's injured, either falling off a horse or trying to rope a calf, the boy who's her co-worker, and who she has a crush on, has to take off her shirt and discovers she's really a girl. I forget whether they fall in love or she's humiliated and runs away.
Started a diary again in college, which I kept up sporadically for a few years. But made the mistake of showing something I'd written to the young man (Jack) who I eventually married; don't remember what he said to me about it, but I read a letter he wrote to his best friend in which he made snide comments about it, so I stopped writing again. (A few years ago, after he died, I found a packet of letters he'd written to that friend, who'd returned them to Jack a few years earlier. Reading through them, I realized that in that period of his life, he was snide about *everyone* even people I know he liked and considered friends. And I also noticed that there was nothing else in the packet after a letter about having met me. I think he threw out all the later letters with their snide or less flattering comments about me — just the sort of sweet thing he would have done.)
The summer before I got pregnant, I was reading Anais Nin's diaries and thinking, I want to keep a diary. This time I will really do it, and I won't throw it away if I reread bits and don't like the person I seemed to be at that time. So that's how my 50+ years of writing, sometimes a lot, sometimes not so much, in what's now called a journal came to be. And eventually I became a writer who occasionally gets published.
------------------------------------
I’m participating in the 15th annual Slice of Life Challenge over at Two Writing Teachers. This is day 4 of the 31-day challenge. It’s not too late to make space for daily writing in a community that is encouraging, enthusiastic, and eager to read what you have to slice about. Join in!
