My grandfather played Freddie Bobbsey to my Flossie.
When I rolled around and splashed in the Atlantic (living room), it was fine.
At bedtime my mother and I would tell double stories, each taking over from the other.
We lived on 14 acres of land with no children nearby, so even in grade school, I invented friends. Maudie lived in a house under the big rock and Anita's home was under the huge juniper bush.
I co-opted Little Maida's gang from Spectacle Island and became Beverly Gray to solve mysteries.
School was different. Rules were strict. I always wondered why I had to use thick crayons when my Crayolas were thin and easier to use.
What would happen if I didn't stay within the lines?
Why did I have to print when I could already write?
Still, I went along.
High school was the same. In my junior year, the girls decided to have a wear-a-burlap-bag-to-school day. The local farm store had a banner sales the week before of burlap bags.
My grandmother, an excellent seamstress, made a jumper (not a sweater for my Brit friends but a sleveless dress) for me which I wore over my blue baby doll blouse.
The administration was apopletic. They sent everyone home to change.
They could have taught us how burlap bags were once made with patterns because poor people, who couldn't afford other fabrics, made kids' clothes out of them. Or they could have had us do a fashion show or art exhibit on the more imaginative ones while suggesting we not do this again.
At uni, the prof for my Victorian poets class did not hand me back my essay on Browning's "My Last Duchess" and asked to see her after class where she proceeded to tell me that it was unacceptable, and when I was in grad school, I should never, ever try something like that again.
I had written it as a psychologist report on the duke.
Only as I was going out the door, did she admit she enjoyed it, but I still had to do it over.
The hardest part of my M.A. in creative writing was not the two novels I produced but the academic thesis on repeated symbolism in John Irving's work. Despite working in corporate communications and as a journalist for years prior to grad school, every thing I learned about writing to communicate had to be hidden under unnecessary verbiage.
Now in old age, I can be as creative as I want. A boring beige car was covered with butterfly stickers. I decorate my laptop.
As a writer with 17 books to my credit, I do follow suggestions for good writing such as show don't tell. I let my mind go off on tangents.
I was lucky that creativity was a family value, almost to a point if I were in trouble, a good story would reduce punishment. I was lucky that the system didn't beat the creativity out of me and conforming became a game with its own rewards but ignored whenever possible.
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