Words

I have been a story-teller since I learned to talk. 

My earliest memory is telling my father about my dream house. I was three years old. By the age of six, I told stories to my classmates during the wonderful "Show and Tell" of 1st Grade (do children still have this opportunity?) during which I described the fox I encountered in Golden Gate Park. My family assumed, with fond mockery, that I had made the story up. High praise for a would-be novelist! However, I was proved truthful by consequent media reports of the red-coated predators in popular areas of this iconic location.

My credentials as a potential author of fiction were validated in sixth grade when I presented my teacher, Mrs. O'Brien, with a book report on (Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust) Marcel Proust's novels, Remembrance of Things Past, which I had never read! Only many years later did I realize how generous my French-born sixth grade teacher had been by not sending me to see the Principal, Miss Ryan. 

The book was one of many on the bookshelves of my parents' living room. Both my mother and father were avid readers, a passion that I inherited from the point of a creator. I was not as much interested in reading as in creating material to be read. Although I have gone on tangents into visual arts, indulge my love of singing, and earn a living with my understanding of technology, finance and administration, words are my beloved tools of the trade. 

I continued my apprenticeship in high school where I won an "A" for a book report on The Red Pony by John Steinbeck. My teacher, Mr. Lombardi, taught me the value of simplicity and the importance of placing emphasis on the significant. The opening sentence of my book report was Gitano was dead. I subsequently named the male protagonist in my novel, Salsa Dancing with Pterodactyls, David Miguel Gitano.

One of my professors told another that I wrote "the best sentences" of any of my fellow graduate students. I have worn that trade-peculiar badge of honor with both pride and humility ever since the receiving professor shared the statement with me. Also the responsibility. One of my professors further encouraged my ambition by praising my understanding of the male psyche. And another schooled his pupils with what he called the "taxi driver test" of literature: what we recognize now as "the hook".

My love of words and using them to tell stories is a forever love affair, although often unrequited! I do my best by them, as is required of any writer. We are what we write after all.

George Rupert Smith stretched his legs across the gap, toward the bench his sergeant, Morton Pierce, occupied to the full extent of his physical being. Though the train could not progress any slower up the coast, Rupe pressed his back against the upholstered seat as though he could hold the engine back by force of will. 

     

-- First paragraph from Pavane for Miss Marcher, Leigh Verrill-Rhys, August 2017

 Happy St. Stephen's Day/Boxing Day to all!

When I Started This Writing Gig

What makes a normal kid want to write? I grew up reading fairy tales and telling my own stories. I had no idea that what I found a natural and necessary part of my life was a fundamental part of human experience. From earliest times, humans have told their stories with drawings on cave walls, songs of heroism, tales of struggle and adversity, sonnets of love.

As a child, I had stories roving around in my thoughts from my earliest recollection. My experiences always form some part of my novels, not necessarily in their exact context. Every writer makes use of material from their lives.


One of my lecturers once claimed that new writers too often write about the one thing they know the least about: themselves. However, that is the primary motivation for story-telling, to bring into focus and clarity our individual perceptions of our world.

Many of us keep diaries, journals, personal web logs: what else is an Internet based profile page but a public accounting of our lives and all too often our interactions with others who may not want their personal experience exposed.

Some of these exposés have attained the status of literary efforts, attracting readers and followers beyond their initial purpose, turned into cults, transformed into another communication medium such as film and print.

With the advent of the digital age, there seems to be no barrier to what and when or how a person can expose their innermost thoughts. The cacophony of experience thus laid before us will be of vast importance to historians of the future.

But I suspect most of what we currently call ‘being connected’ will be seen in an entirely different light in future generations, just as we see the very popular entertainment, tableaux, of the Regency and Edwardian periods as archaic and quaint.

Without a doubt, we will still be telling our stories but the form these take will be beyond our present imaginative capabilities.

All the same, we cannot tell our stories without a past upon which to base them and they will have no meaning without the context of our era and our experience of it. We invariably look to the past to inform our present and future. Our natural curiosity compels us to look for meaning and motivation in what we ourselves have seen and felt as well as how that plays out in the scheme of all mankind.

One of my most important experiences was to collect the oral and written histories of women during World War II. We know a good deal about what men experience in war, but reading and hearing about women’s lives at this traumatic time in our not-so-distant past helped me to realize a fundamental fact: we are not so different in our wants and needs from any person who has ever lived upon the earth.

What Joseph Campbell found true about the ancient hero odyssey is true in every story written by modern writers. As Aristotle theorized, every story must have the critical element of truth: not as fact but as interpreted by the listener/reader. Every story is a journey of change: from unknown to known; from apart to bonded; from static to dynamic and all the various ways in which the human joins humanity.


I haven’t quite figured it all out yet, so I keep writing!

Suppose You Write a Book...

...And what?

Why do we tell stories? For me, this activity became a lifelong occupation from the age of three. One night, I woke from a nightmare that, to this day, fills me with dread and a feeling of sick emptiness. I crawled into my parents' bed for safety. I had no words for the terrible dream or the terror I felt. 

Instead, I told a story to my wakeful father about the house I wanted to live in when I grew up. My father was a carpenter, so it was possible to believe he would build the house for me. Concentrating on a future possibility took me away from a present danger.  

From that night on, I found great comfort in using my imagination to tell stories about an alternative reality. I spent long hours alone, content to fill my thoughts with the people and events I created, and 'rewriting' the endings of movies I had seen. During my teenage years, I added drawing to my work box of tools but the stories still took place in my head. 

Not long after this, my first year in high school, I moved to another state. I made two friends in my new high school, both of whom had a similar story-telling penchant. We told each other stories, interactive between the three of us, exchanging ideas and characters, building worlds around make-believe situations. In my second year in high school, back in California, I continued this collaborative effort with other friends and again during my early college years. 

In college, my first choice of a major was art but, finally, writing emerged as my true avocation. Once the decision was made, I entered a phase of my education that was so incredibly rich and textured, I have continued learning ever since. Fortunately, writing is an art form that demands constant discovery. 

But why do I write? One answer is clear: not for the money!  

Our ancestors told stories to explain the mysteries of the

environment, for comfort, for entertainment during the long dark, winter nights. Our own reasons for story-telling are similar. In antiquity, knowledge of the forces of the universe were explained by the imagined existence of magic and the supernatural. How is that different from our own society's love affair with Dracula, Terminators, Angels and the Once Upon a Times of 21st Century entertainment? 

What was formalized by Aristotle and Euripides is our premier source of coming to terms with a universe we understand only marginally better than our cave-dwelling progenitors. The depth and breadth of human imagination, and the drive to express it, cannot be contained, no matter how frequently a story is told. Every one of us has our own, individual interpretation of events. If our telling strikes a chord with others, we have succeeded in expressing a basic human truth and kept the terrors of dreams at bay.