Writing for my father

If I write for anyone in this world it is my father. All my life my father has been my silent inspiration. I did not know until I was much older how much my writing meant to him. My father had hidden away a story I wrote when I was around four years old, it wasn’t much of a story mind you. I had taken a bunch of lined paper, folded it in half, for the inside and then did a cover. On the cover was the title ‘The Haunted House’ with a hand drawn picture of a house and a ghost coming out of the top window.

The pages had aged and tarnished over the years, when he showed it to me. The edges had been eaten at by mice. He told me he had found it in the attic of our old house. When I opened the pages there was only a small paragraph inside.

‘Once upon a time there was a little house, people said it was haunted,’ the sentence was so basic and true it made me laugh, even at four I was into the unknown. My father worked second shift and got home late and stayed up much later than most of the family, it was during those times that we really got to talk and go over ideas.

I don’t think I ever told my father how much it meant to me that he had kept this small artifact of the beginnings of my writings, I hope he’ll have a chance to read this article and that he’ll know. As I got older I wrote more and more, usually during those late hours when my father was home. We’d brainstorm ideas, and he’d say your taking to much time describing that get to the action, or slow down, it’s getting too jumpy there. It was those statements that smoothed out the roughness of my earlier work.

I tell people who don’t know my father that he is a crazy genius, and I mean that in the fondest of hearts. Life has never been easy for my father, and nothing life threw at him has ever beaten him. My father has brilliant ideas, and his mind goes a mile a minute, to the point that it’s hard for him to focus in on one task or one idea. But when the one comes, his mind won’t rest until he figures it out, researching for hours and days, tracking down theories and ancient maps.

It’s usually around then that I get the call, ‘I have an idea for a new story for you.’ I say ‘call’ because my family moved up north last year. I’ll reach for a pen and jot down all he has to say, and then ask him to email down the rest. For as long as I can remember my father never wrote any of his ideas, he left that to me. I remember my dad told me when he toured in the army that he had written a novel about a horse rancher, which followed along the genealogy of the horse’s blood lines. I had asked him if I could read it but it had been long since lost between moving houses.

When I started trying to really write for money, I was told about Associated Content’s website, and I eagerly took a stab at it, unsure if they’d even find my writing publishable. I was glad to find that they did. So when my first few pieces got published I sent my dad the links, which was when I got the call. ‘I read your stories on the web, I know they are supposed to be short, but you gotta slow down. When you were younger you put so much detail in to your stories that I couldn’t wait for you to get to the action, but now don’t forget to slow down. Don’t get me wrong; reading a paragraph of your work still keeps my drawn even with my short attention span.

I hope this gets to the action quick enough for you Dad, but I did try to slow down. I love you, thank you for being my silent inspiration when the family was asleep and never aware how much you influenced me to write with the passion and intensity for that one idea.