“My fingertips write like a boy left alone at home.”

He senses a freedom that he has sought for so many years, but never realized he had the ability to dig into until the moment he wrote his first sentence to a story.

Was it in grade school that he first discovered the secret? It could have been Sister Josephine Francis who instilled the love of writing while guiding the boys and girls writing with or without the Palmer method.

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I found I could be all alone in the classroom pretending that I was someplace else, perhaps back at home where my imagination knew no boundaries. I could fly, fight and forget whatever my author’s heart wanted me to experience. I was limited by nothing except fear of having to read something I wrote aloud. In the classroom or while standing in front of a group patiently awaiting what I had to say during a closing argument I wrote for the defendant the night before.

Writing starts from that child deep inside of all of us!

Writing from these fingertips has been exhilarating. They also got me into trouble when I revealed something someone may not have wanted shared in public. How was I to know you shouldn’t lie to an ex-girlfriend you met ten years after breaking up and not being able to tell her the truth of why you sensed the earlier magic was gone?

You created a fiction about yourself. Your fingertips went to work on the boy inside when you told her the reason you didn’t go to bed with her was because you were gay. (See: My Mixed Metaphors)

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You wanted to ease her concern about herself her self-worth in the eyes of a former lover.

Yet, your writing has been uplifting at times. It made people cry and causes a tear or two to rise up when you re-read a blog post especially late at night with a cool glass of red wine.

You still are the little boy left all alone at home. Now go out and write some more. Tell more stories with your magical fingertips and bring people closer to an understanding of what is really important in life. Their imagination that the child inside can still manifest!

(Meeting with writers at “Just Write” today we focused on metaphors which I tried to write about in the above sentence, only to find out it was really a simile. Darn it.)