One of the Lucky Ones
When I first
started playing around with this writing thing, I needed to overcome a
disadvantage...
My parents.
I'd been reading a lot, and all these books had moms and/or dads and/or authority figures who had some negative impact on the characters’ lives; thus, the trauma, the angst, the character-shaping behaviors. These were emotions and events readers could identify with, hold onto, with a sort of hope that maybe their lives weren’t so bad. Or, at least, it was something they could overcome.
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| With a sense of humor, too! |
Me?
I was one of the
lucky ones with creative, encouraging, supportive parents.
That followed me all my life, not just with my mom and dad but with, for example, an aunt who wanted nothing more on her birthday than to play tennis with me* and an uncle who delighted in posing challenging riddles and lateral puzzles when he came across them.
This morning,
out of the clear blue, I flashed back to this one moment, six-year-old me, standing in my parents bedroom, showing my dad my newly lost tooth. “If I put a dime** under my pillow instead, will the tooth fairy leave me a tooth?” It wasn’t a naïve
question; rather, my early attempt at cleverness. Well, the way my dad rushed me
to my mom and had me repeat that, you might have thought I was really something
special.
In their eyes, I was.
That’s the environment I had. And it’s the one I held close when I decided I was going to write novels.
I’d never taken a creative writing course. I had no clue about character development, story arcs, rhythm, pacing—you name it—other than the fact that I’d read voraciously my whole life. But because of the support I received with whatever I tried to do, I knew I could succeed.
And I could
leave the bad-parent books to someone else.
Award-winning author Jody Feldman soon realized she could write books in which the bad guys were other people. Because of all the support she's received, she loves paying it back (and forward) by mentoring beginning writers.
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