The Book Stacks

I don’t remember when my love affair with books began—I only know that I can’t remember a single moment of my life when I was not madly, passionately in love with the written word. I’ve spent some of the happiest hours of my life curled up on my bed, reading, my glasses being bent horribly out of shape from laying on the side of them, but I didn’t care. I was Anne of Green Gables, I was Elnora from “The Girl of the Limberlost,” I was Jo March. I can recall the feelings I had when Mac and Rose finally recognized their love for each other (“Rose in Bloom”) and how I thrilled when Esther walked into the king’s court (“Behold, Your Queen”). That was my world as a child. It was all the world I needed.

Now that I’m supposedly an adult, you’d think I would have moved on. But no. Books call to me like a siren, luring me in with promises of love stories, adventure, drama. I feed on good plots. I breathe in good dialogue. A well-crafted phrase makes my heart beat. I can’t function if I’m not reading. It’s oxygen, it’s plasma.

I guess it’s only natural that with this fascination with books would come the desire to write them. I think I was about seven or eight when I wrote my first poem. And you remember that scene in “The Music Man,” when the boys’ band finally gives a show and the mother in the audience stands up and yells, “Play for me, Linus!” – well, that was the reaction my mother had. She took one look at that first poem and decreed that I was going to be a writer. I think the poor thing got a little jaded from that point—anything I wrote was good in her eyes, even the misguided poem I wrote about bread. Yeah, that’s right, bread. But the point is, she supported me, and I grew up feeling that I could someday become a writer.

Stories speak to me. I see a newspaper and read the headlines, and suddenly I’m crafting a whole world to go around those words. I was at Wendy’s last night and saw two girls eating with their mother, and found myself inventing their dialogue. When I wrote my first two books, it was history speaking to me, the desire to be known and understood, and I just wrote it down.

My latest and most personal release was much the same way. As I sat down to write “Season of Sacrifice,” the words just flooded my mind. The experiences of the people who lived the story I was writing became a part of me and I was merely the conduit. It was a melding together of mind and heart and spirit, all coming together in the same place at the same time. I spent so much time writing that I got sick and didn’t care. All that mattered was the project, was giving honor to the words.

I’m not sure how all this started or if my desire to write will ever be quenched. I do know that I’d write even if no one ever read a single word. I’d write if all I had to write on was the back of a grocery receipt. And I don’t know if I ever will try to define it or understand it—there’s something fun about being mystical.

TristiPinkston.com