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Inside the Mind of Mark the Writer
The Write Start
Obviously one has to read before one can write ... right? My parents started teaching me to read when I was four years old, at home, with posterboard flash cards. When I started Kindergarten, I could already read paragraphs and when I started first grade, I had read all the Dr. Seuss books in the house. There were many. I got bored with most books, though, and mostly enjoyed reading about our nation's fledgling space program and a few juvenile fiction works about life in space. I guess that was around third and fourth grades. Then, in high school, my mother handed me The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings and said, "Try these, I think you'll enjoy them." She had already read them all. As far back as I can remember, my mother worked the entire New York Times crossword on a Sunday afternoon. She was brilliant. My early favorite authors, in addition to J.R.R. Tolkien, were Roger Zelazny and Philip Jose Farmer. I had the rare opportunity to meet both authors at a comic con in the early 1980s and got a tiny bit of 1-on-1 encouragement! Still not believing I could write professionally, I went home and kept at short stories, children's stories, and whatever else seemed fun to write about.
The Write Encouragement by that One Special Teacher
I took College Prep English in my senior year of high school. We had to write a short story. I had never written one before but I wrote what I could come up with the night before it was due. My ADHD, undiagnosed because in 1977 nobody knew it was a thing, caused me a lot of frustrations. I scratched through and edited thinking I was turning in the final thing. The next day, Ms. Bowers said, "We have one person who turned in a final draft when only a rough draft was due." She then called me up and had me read mine in front of the class. I was a little embarrassed but excited because of a huge compliment. Since then, I knew that at some point I wanted to be a writer.
The Write Style? You Mean ... I have ... STYLE?
People have asked me how I come up with what I write and how I figure out how to say it. I guess that's the same as style, isn't it? I could never have expressed it this way before the Internet and technological things we now take for granted but when I sit down to write I stare off into space, disengage my brain and awareness from what is immediately around me, and then it's like I download a whole stream of consciousness from the ether. I took typing my senior year of high school and have never NOT needed it since and so I now type around 80-90 words a minute. So, when the download starts, I let my fingers fly and I don't have to think about the mechanics of what is going on. I visualize and describe and let my fingers express what is playing in my mind. Colors, images, scenes, action, smells, conversation, and feelings like fear, anger, frustration, resentment, love, joy, excitement, you name it, all come together in what I do my best to describe as if I am there and in such a way that readers would also feel like they were there. It's more conversational and verbal than literary.
So, my style. Conversational? Expressionistic? How about, my style is a literary thought explosion? That pretty much sums it up.
Still Wondering What to Put Here
I'll think of it. The way my mind works, I never suffer from writer's block, more like ... brain jam. Too many thoughts. All at once. A trainwreck of thoughts. Or, like I wrote in a poem just today, all my little thought-kids piled onto the slip-and-slide at the same time, piling up at the end screaming, "Go again, go again!" So, maybe I just did think of what to put here, maybe not. I'll keep you posted.
Oh, right, the reason for the photo on this one is that this is my podcast studio where I write the Motivational Devotional. Not sure if that's what's going in this box, though. I just like the picture.
Some people would say this is awfully unprofessional of me to leave a portion of a website like this. Mmmm yeah, I never did fit well into other people's expectations. This is my page. This is my mind. The best way to get to know me is to crawl into that whirlwind I call my mind.
Welcome! Hope you brought coffee.