Welcome to another edition of Open Book Blog Hop. This week’s question is: Where were you at 21? How does that reflect in your writing today?
When I was twenty-one in 1982, I entered my junior year at Rocky Mountain College, located in Billings, Montana, about 150 miles north of Sheridan, Wyoming, where I’ve lived since 1973. After attending the local college and living at home for two years, going to school away from home was quite an adjustment. Fortunately, it wasn’t that far away, and I came home weekends when I could get transportation.
I never considered a career in writing at the time. This was probably because my mother, may she rest in peace, rewrote most of my school papers, even when I was a student at Sheridan College. She taught English there and apparently didn’t want her fellow faculty members, from whom I took English, to see my less than adequate writing style. Who knows why she rewrote my high school assignments?
Instead of writing, I pursued a career involving music. Long story short, I became a registered music therapist and worked in nursing homes and other senior facilities for years. I didn’t do any serious writing until my mother passed away in 1999.
How about you? What were you doing at twenty-one? If you’re an author, how has that affected your writing? You can click here to participate in this week’s hop and read other bloggers’ responses.
New! Why Grandma Doesn’t Know Me
Copyright 2021 by Abbie Johnson Taylor.
Independently published with the help of DLD Books.
Sixteen-year-old Natalie’s grandmother, suffering from dementia and confined to a wheelchair, lives in a nursing home and rarely recognizes Natalie. But one Halloween night, she tells her a shocking secret that only she and Natalie’s mother know. Natalie is the product of a one-night stand between her mother, who is a college English teacher, and another professor.
After some research, Natalie learns that people with dementia often have vivid memories of past events. Still not wanting to believe what her grandmother has told her, she finds her biological father online. The resemblance between them is undeniable. Not knowing what else to do, she shows his photo and website to her parents.
Natalie realizes she has some growing up to do. Scared and confused, she reaches out to her biological father, and they start corresponding.
Her younger sister, Sarah, senses their parents’ marital difficulties. At Thanksgiving, when she has an opportunity to see Santa Claus, she asks him to bring them together again. Can the jolly old elf grant her request?
***
My Corner 
Abby I only want to say I been there, I glad your found your voice!
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Thank you. I wish now that I’d thought to try writing again sooner before my mother died. I think she might have liked my more mature writing style.
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I think at 21 maybe we haven’t had enough life experiences to write about.
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That’s true, but I could have written fiction. I took a creative writing class in high school. Of course, my mother rewrote all the stories I turned in. She should have been a writer. Maybe knowing that writing probably wouldn’t bring in enough income, she decided instead to live vicariously through me. Who knows?
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Many mothers do live through their kids for sure.
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At 31 – I met my future husband at age 15, married him at age 17. We had our first child at age 19, and that year before she was born we purchased our first house. At age 20, we were expecting our second daughter who arrived just before my 21st birthday. By the time she was 2, we purchased our second home, where we still live today after 61 years of marriage. While I was not writing during those years, I was reading every day – philosophy and classics mostly. I read aloud to my little babies all the time – Shakespeare, and everything else I loved was what they heard from birth.
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Oops! I meant to say at age 21 –
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Lynda, I think it’s important for parents to read to their children. Not only would that foster a love of books but also an interest in writing.
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Yes, my children are readers. Our son is an author and educator. One daughter is a librarian and teacher. the other 3 daughters are readers. One daughter read books to her babies as they were forming in her womb. She would go upstairs to the baby room she had prepared for their arrivals, and she sat in a rocking chair reading books to them. She did this every day before their births.
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I think my first fifty years were spent storing up everything I needed to write realistic characters and places, based on my life. it all came out when it was ready.
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That’s good. But I think some writers started at an earlier age.
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I tried writing a book at the age of 20. I say tried, because I wrote it but realized it was not-so-good!
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This is a wonderful thing that you recognize the importance of storing memories and that there is a certain time when they are ready to harvest. Your material has gestated within you. It seems like you have a treasure chest full of rich and mature life stories to choose from in your writings as a keeper of memories. There is always a right time for us to begin writing and it is an individual matter. When you begin writing, it is the right time for you.
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