I received an email from a lady saying “God has blessed you with a great talent.” While I certainly appreciated the complement, I don’t believe what the lady was saying was exactly true. I believe in God and I thank him for all of my blessings – water, food, clothing, fairly decent family – but I don’t think the gift or ability to write was one of the blessings that he has given me.

Back in high school, I hated to write, well I hated to do most of my school work, but writing was something I didn’t look forward to. Actually I dreaded it and to be frank with you I don’t think I was that good of a writer. I don’t have anything that I wrote in high school, but I can just assume that I was quite terrible at it because my GPA in high school was somewhere around a 2.0. A good student I wasn’t. But back to my original point – I don’t think God gave be the talent of writing. I think that talent has been nurtured with lots of mistakes made along the way.

I heard a writer say one time that everybody cannot learn to write. I agree and disagree. I believe that if you really want to learn to write you can. Writing is reading. Writing is making mistakes. Writing is painstakingly aggravating. Writing is for crazy people who refuse to give up and writing is persistence and dedication. The good writer has lots of luck along the way and lots of revelations from your conscience or God, but this only happens because you’ve worked and your brain is thinking hard to solve a problem in a story line. You may scheme up a result that makes you seem brilliant, but the fact of the matter is you will have worked your ass off to seem so gifted. God didn’t make your brain work any better than the next person’s. Here’s how I believe it’s worked out so well for me: I chose to write and explore and when I chose to do that God chose to help me – but only because I helped myself first.