From AgingTopic: Whether you’ve been thinking of capturing your memoirs for the next generation or regaling readers with humorous stories or compelling drama, we found someone who encapsulates what many other writers can clearly relate to… and after reading this, feel free to share your comments with us or the author at [email protected] Take a look at two of her books below which you can find on Amazon! Diana Parks prompts us with:
The Write Reason
I cry as easily as I laugh; neither takes much. I used to tear up at Kodak and Coke commercials, and my kids still rib me for crying at Air Bud. I find most jokes funny, especially my own, and I don’t mind embellishing a story if the addition adds humor or provides a slightly different angle from the last time I told it.
My life bleeds into my pen. Heeding the advice Jo Marsh received in Little Women, I write what I know – what makes me ache, what makes me cackle, what empties me, and what fills me. I write what I would love to read; I think most writers do.
We plod along a line that makes its first chalky mark the day we are born and continues, however straight or squiggly, until we take our last breath. Writers nudge us off our timelines, tripping us up on experiences and discoveries of people and worlds other than our own. Their stories, true or imagined, catapult us backwards, forwards, into blinding light, and sometimes into the deepest black, but seldom are they a mirror of our own lives. A close friend told me he doesn’t read fiction because he considers it frivolous. Life’s too short, he says, and he’d rather learn from biographies, historical events, and devotionals, enriching himself to be a better man. Good novels accomplish no less. The more fiction I inhale, the better I understand the human condition, the more compassion I develop, and the greater conviction I face. To step into a poor family’s cabin in a West Virginia holler or a ninety-year-old’s nursing home through the pages of a novel cracks the protective shell I’ve developed throughout a blessed and privileged life. Light shines through, sometimes searing, sometimes seeping, but I always see more clearly.
I write to provide another flame by which readers might see outside themselves. My spark might flicker, it might ignite a bonfire, or it might only emit the sulfur-like smell that shoots up your nose when a match fails to light. When all my matches run out, though, I will find another matchbook, and I will strike again.