By Lee Anne Wonnacott
AUTHOR

By Lee Anne Wonnacott

Literature & Fiction
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I write. I write everything. I read a lot, too. Last year I think I read 80+ books. Cookbooks, operator manuals, and the magazines in the doctor's office. Only a couple of them actually put me to sleep. You should write, too. Get one of those half-size spiral ring notebooks and start packing it around with you. Write down the things you see. The accident on the freeway. The person in line in front of you at the grocery store. Write it down. What dd you seen, hear, smell or taste? This is where your story will come from. It is flowing past you right now and you don't know it. Did you hear that siren? Did you wonder what was going on? There is a story there. Recently, I underwent a surgical procedure to fix something inside me. Five seconds after the anesthesiologist put the mask over my nose, I told him, "Prep the team. We're going off world." I could hear him laughing as I closed my eyes. What he didn't know was that I saw an entire story in those final five seconds of consciousness. I started writing that story when I woke up in recovery. There are three arguments against writing. "I can't afford to write." Cut out two of those drive-through coffees you buy each week and you can afford the notebook and a pack of pens from the dollar store. Don't eat dinner out this week. The big one is stop buying alcohol. "I don't have time to write." Yes, you do. The first thing you do is have your cable turned off and only have Internet/wifi access. If you write at the kitchen table or in your living room, move your television into the bedroom. If you write lying in bed, move the TV to another room. Set up a schedule that you will write on Tuesdays from 8:00pm to 10:00pm. Put a calendar page up on the refrigerator as a reminder. Set the calendar on your phone so you have time to write. "I don't need/don't want to write." You might tell people that you could write a bestseller because of the things you have seen and experienced. I think it was a Stanford grad student that wrote her sociology thesis on the Burning Man events she attended over ten years. I met an Emergency Medical Technician that has ridden ambulances for ten years. He felt nobody would believe what he had seen so he had denied himself the opportunity to write. One of the best things I ever did was sit down on the barstool next to a long-haul trucker. I noticed his multiple tattoos up his arms and I offered to buy him another if he would tell me that story. That story was the inspiration for "Tarragon", my newest book that spawned "The Man From Marvessa." Start writing. Now.
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