The first memory I have of reading, is struggling through phonics in the first grade. Well, something must have clicked, because the next memory is that of childhood favorites like: Curious George, Clifford the Big Red Dog, Harry the Dirty Dog, The Berenstain Bears, and Harold and the Purple Crayon. With imagination and the right book I could go anywhere and do anything! Growing up was a paycheck to paycheck kind of existence and family travel was either to visit family or out on the boat to fish or visit one of the many islands off the Mississippi Gulf Coast where I grew up. It would have been nice to be able to travel and go any place I wanted, and I have traveled a good bit more since I've been married, than I did growing up, but that just isn't realistic for most of us. Even if I did have the money and the time, I would still be limited to visiting a place in the present time and only getting a small taste of the landscape, culture, history, etc. and that is great, I love to travel. Reading though, gives you a way to "travel" that is unlimited and at your fingertips at any moment. Let's say I visit a childhood home of Abraham Lincoln. There will probably be a placard outside telling me something like, Abraham Lincoln lived here when he was 8 years old and he loved to play with his toy logs with his neighbor friend. OK...but wouldn't it be so cool to get a glimpse back in time and see Abraham Lincoln running through the rooms of his house looking for his little logs, yelling to his mother that he was going out to play with his friend, then watching him slam out the door and run out into the yard to find his friend? That is what reading can do for you. It can take a small piece of history and make it come alive. I personally am a fiction fan, but Biographies, Autobiographies, and many other genres are also good reads many times. ( I personally try to stick with books that are clean and in line with my convictions.) With reading you can be in the present, the past, the future or in a totally different world altogether. You can go down a mine with the miners in the coalfields of Lancashire, UK or West Virginia. Instead of walking through a museum of the Holocaust, you could experience to a small extent the horror through the eyes of the Resisters or the Jewish child, father or mother. Instead of wondering what getting off a Higgins Boat and running on to Omaha Beach might feel like, you could see a Private with a face and a name running and praying and hoping and get a glimpse as you look and see the life changing things he sees. You could scale Mount Everest, swim across the English Channel, etc., etc., the options out there are endless and all you need is an imagination and the cost of a book. You may ask, "Why not just watch the movie?" Have you ever heard someone who read the book first, come out of a movie and say the movie was better? I haven't, in fact many of the movies I have seen after reading the book are a let down. Why is that? Because, there is no possible way for a movie to fit in all the details that a book can do and watching the movie just leaves you wanting those things that were left on the cutting room floor.
So how does one make the leap from Reader to Writer? For me I not only loved to read, but I loved to make up my own stories. Most of them stayed in my mind, but the few I wrote down are probably buried in the Gulf of Mexico somewhere after Katrina stole them. And....shhhh....don't tell the Authors, but if I didn't like an ending or I didn't like the way a book left something out that I thought should have been included, I would add it in or change it to fit my view of how I thought it should have been written. Now since I did that, I expect someone may end up doing the same to me one day. But that's OK, because reading and writing are a boundless means of expression and experience. We could read the same book, but see it completely different. We could start with the same information and end up with a different story. Stories fill my head, even now while I am working on Hope for Charity, I have at least two other stories in my mind that I would like to write next. So, my love for reading and writing goes deep and it is and has always been a part of me. I have accepted that God created me like this for a purpose. He made me a Writer so that I could bring Him glory in my Writing. He gives me the lesson and helps me to teach it through a story. For instance, in Hope for Charity, I started with the knowledge that the relationships we have with our father's are the most important relationships we have when we are young. Those relationships can make or break a life. So, I wanted to take that idea back into the 18th century and compare the relationships with a son and his father and a daughter and her father and then compare them both with the relationship they both had with God the Father and how they differed. Writing for me is a calling. It took me a long time to believe it, but I pray that God will take the stories He gives me and somehow use them for His glory, and for anyone who reads them, they will learn a little something, experience a part of history they would have never experienced otherwise, and that they will grow in their faith in the Lord Jesus and maybe love reading just a little more.
So take a cheap trip for the cost of a book and use your imagination to experience the past, present, future or a whole other world altogether.
In Christ,
Sandy Kay Slawson
