Like most writers, I've been writing my entire life. Well, since I was six and learned to write. The earliest story I wrote that is still in existence starts like this:

Vickie walked into the tiny, cool store which was the sole item of old Mrs. Summerson's income. Vickie was 5'7" and slender with long blond hair. She had big light blue eyes fringed with long dark lashes and she has a few freckles on her small turned up nose. She was wearing a pair of old, rather tight fitting, faded cut-offs and a light blue flowered halter-top and her feet were bare. She saw the small withered old lady come pattering from the back rooms of the building and smiled.

I wrote the story at the request of my best friend Vickie. Vickie was 5'7" and slender with long blond hair. She had big light blue eyes fringed.... Oh, wait. You already know that. It was the summer between our sophomore and junior years in high school, and Vickie wanted me to write a romance about her and Dave, a boy she liked. The story is 24 pages long, and I don't know how it ends because I never finished it. There's a note at the bottom of page 24 that says, "Change Dave to Kelly." Because by the time I reached page 24, Vickie had a crush on a different boy.

WRITING TIP # 1: Write what you want to write, not what your best friend wants you to write. 'Cause she'll change her mind. Dave and Kelly may have been interchangeable to Vickie, but they screwed up my story.

The story is written in pencil on bright yellow notebook paper. Other sections of the notebook are of different colored paper, and I used each section for different projects. The green section has other stories about Vickie, but Katie joins her in them. There's the story about Vickie and Katie getting kidnapped, Vickie and Katie stowing away in the sleeping quarters of a huge semi-truck, Vickie and Katie somehow vanquishing the junior class with their instant and inexplicable popularity on the first day of school. The longest of those stories is 5 pages long.

The purple section contains my favorite quotes. I frequently skipped class in high school and hid out in the library, where I self-educated by browsing the titles and reading what interested me. That's where I first encountered Gone With the Wind, Pride and Prejudice, and Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. I spent hours perusing Bartlett's, jotting my favorite quotes in the purple section of my rainbow colored notebook. Here are a couple of the shorter quotes that had special meaning for me when I was sixteen:

Foresight is very wise, but foresorrow is very foollish; and castles are, at any rate, better than dungeons in the air. -- Sir John Lubbock

Never argue with a man who talks loud. You couldn't convince him in a thousand years. -- David Stair Jordan

There are no quotes by women. I know Bartlett's has them, but maybe I didn't make it as far as the sections where women had been educated.

The blue section contains my favorite story. There's not a hint of Vickie in it. The story takes place in the northwest in the 1880's. Teen orphan Katie (I wasn't big on changing names to protect the innocent) steals the cash box from her wicked uncle's store, hops on a horse, and runs away, stopping only to disguise herself as an old woman first. She wanted to disguise herself as a boy, but her womanly attributes made that a hard sell. As an old woman, though, she could escape the posse as well as other dangers the might befall a young woman alone in the wild west. I like this story. I might even revisit it someday and really write it.

WRITING TIP # 2: Write with tools that make you want to get started. If that means a rainbow colored notebook, get yourself a rainbow colored notebook.

Of course, this was all handwritten. Computers existed only in the movies and on remote secret government land and they took up entire rooms anyway. Electric typewriters had been invented. We had two of them in my freshman typing class, and the teacher rotated us through so that we could all have a chance to experience typing with just the touch of a finger, rather than pounding on the keys like we had to do with the manual typewriters. The only time I ever had to visit the vice principal in high school was when Suzy, my other best friend, and I got caught sneaking into the typing room through an open window. They found us typing away on those electric typewriters, giddy with the freedom of our fingers.

By the time I got to college, I had a typewriter of my own. Manual, of course. I bought it at a garage sale for $10, and only a couple of the keys stuck. In my English Literature 101 class, we were required to keep a notebook throughout the quarter with class notes and answers to the questions listed at the back of each story. I probably wasn't listening carefully to the directions, or maybe I didn't read the syllabus all the way through, but I thought the notebook was for my notes. I didn't realize it was graded, and I didn't find out until about a third of the way through the quarter that we had to turn it in periodically and that it had to by typed! I stayed up half the night typing that notebook on my second-hand key-sticking typewriter, and yes there were plenty of typos and strike-throughs. This was long before delete became a word in common usage. When you made a mistake, you either had to strike over it with correcting tape, which only worked so many times, or you had to type the whole page over. But this was only a notebook, after all. It's not like it was a real assignment or anything, so I didn't worry about it much. Until I got it back with an 'F' on the top, and a note from the professor that said, "You shouldn't even be in college." I'm not kidding. I wouldn't forget something like that.

To this day, I believe the real reason the professor gave me that 'F' and said that nasty thing is because I dared to argue with him in class when he insisted that it was impossible for anyone to read the short story about the hideous mutiliation of a black man's genitals without becoming sexually aroused. I'd read the story and I was not aroused, and I would not back down. He pissed me off. I pissed him off. He had the power, and I had a crummy typewriter. He won.

I stopped going to class, but it was too late to withdraw without actually going to the professor and talking to him about it, which I would rather have died than do. So I just quit going and took an 'F' for the class. I took the same class later at the community college, got an 'A', and wiped that 'F' from my grade point average. In fact, when we got to Shakespeare's Othello, I knew all the answers. The professor divided the class into two groups and she worked with one group and gave me the other to help them understand the play. I didn't tell her that the reason I knew the answers was because I'd read the play in my other English Lit 101 class, where I got an 'F'.

WRITING TIP # 3: Don't back down to asshole English Lit 101 professors. They might win the battle, but it doesn't matter because you're not in their war.

That's all for now. Stay tuned for WRITING TIPS 4, 5, & 6.