Author Renee Savage

How does anyone decide what their passion will be in life? I suppose some people set out to choose what they love, carefully looking between hobbies and interests and coming to a consensus on what they could love best. But I am sure that most of us get no say in the matter. At some point in our lives, we become possessed with a need to create something, and the urge never really leaves us alone.

I started writing just after I learned how. A first-grade project gave us a little book we could write in to tell a story. Holding my little book in my hands filled me with more joy than anything else. Other than the fact that my teacher got a divorce that year, I remember very little else from first grade.

Learning how to read also helped, as I quickly became a voracious reader, quickly passing the reading level of most of my peers. As I read stories of increasing complexity (I read Gone with the Wind in the 4th grade, didn’t understand it hardly at all and do not recommend), I began to imagine myself telling the kind of stories kids in future libraries would check out someday. I developed a taste for literature very early as well, thanks in part to my mother, who read us Jane Austen novels and modeled her own love of reading.

A writer must be a reader, but a reader does not make a writer. Sometimes I wish I had only been born with the reading gene and not the writing gene. It would be lovely to enjoy a book, guilt-free, without imagining how I should be writing or what I could be working on to expel my own creative energy.

The final, most crucial part of my becoming a writer was my attraction to storytelling. (My parents identified this early on as “lying.”) I always wanted to tell the story that made people happy, impressed, or moved. Telling tall tales, or even just trying to amuse myself or others with something I made up brought me a lot of joy and comfort.

So now, here I am, decades removed from the part of my childhood that shaped how I spend my time, stressing over a romance novel with vampires and heiresses. It may not be exactly what the child in me hand in mind, but I am sure she is delighted.

No matter what I am doing with myself, I always feel the compulsion to write. I love taking care of my house, going out with friends, reading books, and watching shows just like everyone else does. But I am always processing my stories, trying to imagine what I should say and how the characters are doing. I keep active notes on my phone with thoughts I have throughout the day when I cannot get to my computer, and my stories are always running in the background of my work computer, ready to be added to when I have a moment.

Since this activity occupies me all day long, I would like to make it my life someday. I have read the grievances of authors who do this for a living everyday, and I know it isn’t easy. Creativity is something I feel I am brimming with now, but that hasn’t always been the case. Keeping up with my own ambition when I have numerous roadblocks had already proven to be difficult.

But there is no other hobby or creative outlet I have stuck with as long and as faithfully as I am writing. Since the fourth grade, I have written short stories, novels, and poems every year. My hobby collection of knitting, watercolors, embroidery, and candle making are all mournfully watching me from the sidelines.

But my word processor? She is thriving, honey!