Authoressing

When people ask me what I am, among the first words I use to describe myself is "author" or "writer".

"Oooh! What do you write?"
"Well, historical fiction mostly, started a bit of fantasy and my own autobiography." (That last usually gets a lot of laughter!)
"Are you published?"
"Well, sort of, yes."
"Are you going to write a book about BMG? (My workplace)"
I have to laugh at that one.
"Maybe," because all experiences can be used.
Then they go off into detailed descriptions of how I could use certain people and feature them and hide names, etc.


So why am I writing this? Because I was thinking about it the other day. As life has gone on, and my friends and I have grown up, I am technically no longer recognised as an author in writing circles. I have little time in the current scheme of live to do more than scribble a few lines here and there, a few story ideas to be worked on when I hit that wonderful stage in life (Lord alone knows when that'll be - I've an idea I'll be still trotting around in my eighties!) when I have "some spare time".

I'm coming to the long-awaited but important conclusion though, that I'll never have "spare time" to indulge in writing, like it's a hobby. It isn't a hobby. It's a core essence of who I am. Why else would stories and characters and people come dancing through my mind, calling out to me, and why else do I use it as part of an introduction as to who I am?

My writing has changed. It's been on the back burner for several years now - apart from my blog.

I'm no longer the little girl of eight, sitting on the old squishy orange carpet hidden safely behind the pulpit platform at Bethany, staring down at the paper and trying to express the childish stories in my head.
I no longer create characters and then try and write a dance for them.

People are my characters. People are my study. My main focus is on people - delightfully intricate, intensely 3D, wildly spinning and tangling people. Lives of webs and weaving, glories of colour and depth.

And these people are where I draw my characters.

I see a man in a crowd. Perhaps he gives me a glance, a half hesitant smile on a thin, sad face in response to my own. A story is born.
A woman pushes a pushchair, trying desperately to marshall three other children past with six massive bags hanging off on all sides. She becomes a character with a side story.

People are characters. And characters are people. And life...is...pain. But. Very Beautiful. Simply from the intrinsic depths of the colour, and the glory, and the wealth of living, and the God Who made life.


In Christ,
~Mademoiselle Siân