Write from the Start: Comeuppances and Email.
Melinda Palacio -- March 17, 2008
If it weren't for email, my stories and poems would have remained stashed between the pages of the Comeback Chronicles, diary entries where I wrote great comeback lines to the taunts and dumb questions mean kids at school often asked.
I often wondered if those mean kids spent their afternoons dreaming up ways to tear me apart and humiliate me. I was extremely shy and kept to myself. Eventually, the loneliness forced me to seek the company of my teachers during recess and lunch. As a child, I was always more comfortable around adults than children my own age. However, my precocious behavior ignited a series of jeers from schoolmates who called me teacher's pet, school girl, goody two shoes, and other names I've erased from my consciousness.
The teasing always left me speechless and immobile. I'm much better on paper. Hours later, sometimes days later, I'd think of the wittiest and snappiest comebacks. Only the kids at school were much quicker than I. They immediately moved on to new forms of torture. What I lacked was the luxury of revision and rewriting my tormented childhood. Once I discovered I had a gift for dialogue and that I could write everything I wanted to say in a notebook, life became easier. I always won on paper. I felt deliciously redeemed, even though the Comeback Chronicles did not represent my best writing effort. I don't know what happened to those journals. They were my arsenal for dealing with mean people, and they proved an old cliché about the pen being mightier than the sword. The Chronicles kept me from getting beat up by the many bullies who threatened to kick my ass for being standoffish and lost in a book.
It took another invention, email, for me to realize that I was indeed better on paper. When I started using email to keep up with friends and family in the late nineties, I took my email correspondences way too seriously. One day, a helpful relative wrote back:
"Stop wasting your talent on the mundane. Write a novel! Do something with your writing other than send humorous and poetic emails. "
My talent? My writing? I mused, not knowing exactly what she was talking about. I didn't believe her at the time, nor take her word seriously, until I sold my first freelance article and saw my byline in big bold newspaper print. An article on the then new doughnut shop that was all the rage: Krispy Kreme Doughnuts. After the interview, the manager at the Krispy Kreme gave me two dozen doughnuts. The doughnuts, along with the $75 check I received for the piece, meant I was a real writer, published Tribune no less. Again, it wasn't my best writing, but it was a start.
When the light bulb went off with a great idea for a novel, I started taking novel writing classes. I learned the mechanics of writing scenes and chapters and story arc. But in the middle of learning how to write a novel, I paused to learn how to write short stories and poetry. I want my prose to pop off the page, sing, dance. My new writing goal is to continue to use a poet's pixie dust as a palette for prose. I no longer cherish my emails. I stick to the necessary info, spend more time on revising my writing, and less time worrying about bullies and what others think about me.