Writing for the Love of Story
A Developing Love of Story
God blessed me with the gift of an active imagination, and as a result, my mind has been filled with stories since as far back as I can remember. I was acting out stories on a home-built rickety raft down at the creek or laying out rocks in the shape of a boat…no a pirate ship! And I would stick a tree branch in the ground with an old sheet or blanket stretched out as a sail, take up my wooden sword and bandana wrapped around my head I would rule the seven seas! But what gave me the impetus to write a story?
I was one of five kids—the only boy dropped right in the middle point of four girls—and we loved games. Along with Monopoly and Old Maids we often played a card game called Authors. Robert Lewis Stevenson—Treasure Island—got me wondering if I could write a story like that. In high school I put my pen to paper to write story. I did not get far before I realized that writing a story was beyond my present abilities. I wrote some short stuff, but it wasn’t very good. I wrote simply for the love of story.
For the love of story I also read many of the books whose titles were from the Author cards. Along with Treasure Island I read Kidnapped, Ivanhoe, Last of the Mohicans, The Deer Slayer and many others-all classics. I read for the love of story, and because of my love of story writing a story was in my blood. As a result I enjoyed many frustrated efforts and many failures. Such is the reality of story writing. But all of those failures were steps toward future accomplishment—and many more failures.
I write for the Love of Story
It must have been around 1980, when I was thirty-four and had two young boys that I got serious about writing stories. I reasoned that my love of story would provide a good means of teaching the boys godly life principles. As I wrote The Helot (helot means servant) I would read it to them instilling truth and engendering discussion. As the boys grew I continued to write stories and read them to them. Those stories later developed into my Accidental Heroes series: The Helot; Dark Danger, Terminus, Primal Blade and Labyrinth (they had other names back then).
Once my boys grew up and left home I continued to write. Why? Because God had given me a love of story. So my next effort was classic fairytale, Wanzalara’s Cottage. It was also the first of my books to be published. It was accepted by a Canadian publishing house that promised to market it in the U.S. as well as Canada. They never followed through on the marketing and less than a thousand books were sold. But I was published! I was not writing to make money. I was writing for the love of story and I simply wanted to have people reading my stories.
