They say you live your unlived potential through your children.
If that is true, then it could be that my writing life is finding its way out through my sons. Both now have started fiction-writing, the older brother penning chapters of a robot epic (with chronicles and sagas in mind), and the younger one composing short, frisky animal tales.
It’s hard to describe my emotions whenever I catch them scribbling in their notebooks or pecking out letters on the laptop – it’s a mixture of parental pride, a wannabe writer’s hurrah, and creative envy; with no restrictions on grammar, logic and plot, imagination has a merry romp in both their minds and streaks through their narratives. Ah – there’s a lesson there for wanting the editor in your head dead.
The pride overrides all the other emotions, of course (there could be a kiasu Mom in me, after all). It’s not that the writing’s particularly good – it’s the fact that they are writing, weaving tales from figments of imagination and snatches of real life. It’s the fact that they are putting pen to paper and downloading the world and scenarios that they see in their heads to black and white type. It’s the fact that the boys are incorporating new words and expressions into their writing and are reading more avidly than before. It’s the fact that they can get just as excited buying notebooks as they are Playstation games.
And it’s the fact that the older one says he enjoys the writing process (oh, heaven!).
And so I tell both, but in particular my eldest, that no matter what happens, no matter what goes on in life, no matter who is around and who dies, no matter what people around say, that they must keep writing. And reading. And writing more.
They will, I hope, appreciate the message once they are older. For now, my job is to encourage and enable, and then to get out of the way (down, you Editor, down!).
And while my own writing ambitions are far from dead, if I do die without a finished manuscript, at least I would die knowing someone in the family can take up the craft, pick up the pen, form lyric and sense from scraps of scribblings, and produce, well, who knows – textual magic.
Filed under: Personal Note, Playing Favourites, Writing
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