I M Perfect lady

I have been attending the "Writer's Journey" a workshop at Finlandia College.  It meets, for free, one night a week for a semester.  It has been a wonderful experience for me to see the different types of authors.  I know I am naive, but I must have had an idea of what an author was, needed, looked liked, and how they were taught.  I was delighted to see they were like regular people.  Regular except they dared to put their thoughts, ideas, imaginations, feelings, desires etc in the written word, and then offered to share them with everyone.  It is like bringing someone into your mind!  Into your world, your areas of vulnerability, sorrow and fear as well as what excites you, brings you joy, and desire, to just name a few.  If done in a way that can hook an ear, it is quite profound.

The more open and revealing and daring, the better.  It is story telling but with a way personal twist!  I had never looked at books from the Author's view.  I only knew what I liked and what I didn't….I just never sat down and thought, what makes a book grab me and what doesn't.  I know that we all have our interests, our areas that we want to explore, but even in our certain areas, there are Authors who can say it in a way that holds our attention.

While trying to decide if I could write, I grappled with the Taught or being an Untaught writer. I truly didn't know if it was acceptable to step out into the Author space without training.  Are you literally allowed to just write.  Just write from what comes into your thoughts, to what has been your experience of this journey.  Is this a free landscape that anyone can wander on to?  Are there not writing police that will arrive and eventually ask me, "who are you and how dare you write, you have no idea of the structure, the grammar and even have trouble with spelling.  Don't you know it takes learning to do this well?  You have no certificate from a school of higher learning!  I think it best to leave the writing to the folks who are well taught and well versed in this area." 

Well I am out here, I am going to try…and I haven't seen any Writer's Police yet.  I am not sure what they look like, but I best come up with a good excuse for being here, writing as a Untaught Writer.

So, I asked myself one day in my journal, "is it really possible to be untaught."  I mean can we really live on this planet to the age of 50 and be untaught.  Surely I have learned something.  I do know words, the alphabet, and I can speak so others understand me.  I can write like I talk.  So am I really and untaught writer.  Maybe we can all be writers.  Maybe the scary part for many of us is that we won't be heard.  That what we have to say will not be important or trusted, or taken seriously.

Untaught or is that an excuse to not write.  How about if we delete that phrase and instead say we can write, but we are untaught as to how to expose ourselves, our inner values to the world.  Maybe we are untaught as how to be courageous, truthful with ourselves.  To open ourselves up to new experiences, to explore areas that are fearful and unknowing.  Maybe I am an untaught explorer.

Because to simply put words down that isn't hard.  To put words down that affect another, now that requires you go deeply within.  To put words down that will resonate with others, that will spark a cord of recognition, to honor the words with feelings and emotions that are true, now that is harder.

Words…they have the power to change lives or wreck them.  They have the power to inflict pain, or to bring awareness into dark areas of our worlds.  They can make us laugh, bring us on a trip and descend us into the darkest of human kind.  I guess, we all have experiences to draw from, it is just are we able and willing to be the courageous ones to put it down on paper for all the world to see?  That is the question….Do you want to be the writer of the human experience or the reader of such.  But in the end, we are all experienced in the experience of being human.  We cannot be an untaught person. We all have been taught something, and we all have something to share.  What we need is the courage to begin. Begin where we are, unsteady, unstable, unused to writing.   If you can write, you are taught.

I am not an untaught writer, but maybe a self taught writer.  I write in my own way, without rules and structure, hoping to carry my message in this vessel, an imperfect lady, just doing what she wants to do.  Write.  To put her truth out there.  To do it my way imperfectly.