A long time ago, gosh, back before I decided I wanted to be a writer, maybe twenty years ago, I wrote a short story called “Sam’s Legacy.” I think I published it on HubPages, where is promptly died a slow death, and then I published it on NIUME, or some other site, where it also died a slow death.
I wrote that story about a next-door neighbor of mine when I was a little kid. I was only about five when we moved into the home on 18th Street in Tacoma, and our neighbors were Sam Witherspoon and his wife Delores. I don’t know how old Sam and Delores were when we moved next door to them, but I do know that Sam came across the Oregon Trail when he was just about my age of five. Well Sam and Delores told me some incredible stories over the years about life “out west” during the second half of the 19th Century, and I’m sure my love of history came from those stories that they told me about covered wagons, Indians, barn-building, drunken fights in mining towns, and the hardships and victories attached to life in the west way back then.
Yes, I was at an impressionable age, so obviously their stories were fascinating, but it was also the way they told their stories that helped them to come alive. I could smell the smoke from the teepees on the Great Plains. I could imagine gathering bison pies under the broiling sun in order to start a fire for cooking after covering another fifteen miles on the Trail. I understood the fear they experienced, the bone-weariness of it all, mixed with the wonder of seeing a new land for the first time.
They were great storytellers, and their storytelling greatly affected me.
And now I’m a storyteller, and it is my hope that one day my stories will greatly affect another little boy, or girl, and they will decide to become a storyteller.
It is a noble undertaking we have chosen. We are the storytellers of our generation.
Treat your calling with respect and reverence.
Be the best damned storyteller you can be!
Bill
“Helping writers to spread their wings and fly.”
Billybuc
Artistry With Words 