Hiding Behind Words

A writer’s life is a solitary one.

We sit at our computers writing words that turn into sentences into paragraphs into pages and ultimately into a finished book.

One of the good things about this? You can be anyone you want to be.

Why is that important?

I’m shy. Oh boy, I’m sure there are friends laughing themselves silly at that declaration.

But it’s true. Growing up I was painfully shy and why I buried myself in books and writing stories. Call it the peril of being an only child with an overactive imagination.

But it was the beginning of what I do now. Back then I wrote about characters that became real to me, my very own invisible playmates. I could thrust myself into a new world where I was brave and confident. Where I could be anyone I wanted to be. Not the shy gawky kid I was.

I was very lucky. Teachers encouraged my love for reading and my need to write stories. Thanks to them I grew in that respect.

What it showed me was that my characters could say what I didn’t have the nerve to say. Do what I wouldn’t be able to do.

Talk about the perfect way to be what you want to be!You run into a rude person in a store. So many things you’d love to say to them, but you don’t.

No problem, go home, create that character for a book and blast them. You’ll feel so much better. Maybe that’s why my favorite alter-ego is a pair of man-eating bunny slippers.

And even now I’m shy. It can be difficult for me to enter a new situation unless a friend is with me. I’ll do it, but I may not be as talkative as I normally am.

So what about you? Do you have the shy gene? How do you cope?

Linda