I REALLY LOVE TO WRITE! I REALLY LOVE TO WRITE ! I REALLY LOVE TO WRITE!

Long before blogging became fashionable, I have always loved to write. In my spare time I wrote, whilst seating in a car driven by someone else long before texting became they force de jour I wrote. Last thing before going to bed I wrote in a diary-

I mean I started keeping a diary at age 12, those dainty kinds with little padlock I remember my mum breaking the lock of one of such diaries at age fourteen in my final year in secondary school and she saw little sketches I had made of the guy I was currently crushing over back then (abeg I wasn’t a naughty teen, I was a classic case of “Too much Mills & Boon and Silhouette Romance paperbacks a much Too early”) and to make things worse it was on the eve of our trip back to Nigeria after a summer holiday with the rest of the family in Italy.

That was a night I didn’t forget for a long time, what with her stating bluntly the effects and repercussions that are the outcome of “following” boys and threatening to report me to my father and of course what she would do to me if she ever so much as imagined I was “doing it”; haba! As if my mind had ever drifted that far, after all I never recall my Mills and boon girls ever quite going that far. Anyway all this coming from a mother who in the company of my aunt three years earlier had almost sent a young man to an early grave with the pounding end of a mortar pestle, so of course I took her threats literally. Lest I forget, I was what they called an early bloomer because at age eleven, I pretty much looked in terms of physical development how I look today, sans the south bound ‘girls’ of course..Anyway not to be distracted by my reminiscing of the power of my mum’s resolve to keep me chaste and her unconventional ways of doing it….
My love for writing continued way into my days at university when my diary was the only place I could be myself..every early heartbreak, dalliances etc always had a place in my diary…I used to fancy myself as some kind of Anne Frank, the young girl who was stuck in an attic during the holocaust whose book based on her diary entries became a best seller worldwide. I used to imagine someone stumbling into my diary years on and becoming famous..Never had it occurred to me that a time would come when blogging private thoughts over the www could become a money spinner for many…my course of study English and literary studies added n no small measure to my love of writing and reading….. I actually was one of the few people to complete Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s progress and its pretty voluminous..
By my Youth Service days circa '89, I had become a rabid writer and by this time having gotten a few reality bites from the school of hard knocks I had also become a people watcher…I was always interested in knowing or understanding the story behind every look, every wince, every grimace and every gesture somebody made. I always constructed in my mind other people’s reality. For me things were never how they seemed and I wrote alternate realities….soon I was to discover another means of escape which grew to almost addictive proportions, movie watching…not just any movies, but deep movies, you know with convoluted story lines, no lighthearted movies for me, I loved to empathize with protagonists in their pain, as a matter of fact I loved to just immerse myself in the plot and experience the whole gamut of emotions the actresses and actors went through. Perhaps it was a way of altering my reality, because trust me, the reality of being a youth corps member in Kaduna was not all I hoped it would be, so writing and movie watching became my favourite pastime much to the chagrin of my friends.
By now I had developed a keen interest in movie dialogues and started jotting down lines and anecdotes from movies. To this day, I still have that particular wine coloured leather bound journal..( I keep it for its sentimental value, it has my late dad’s name inscribed at the bottom right corner in gold letters, so I couldn’t bring myself to throw it out when I eventually got rid of my diaries (that’s story for another day)…today writing down lines from movies is all the more simpler with my Blackberry in hand whenever I am at the movies.
In recent times the only enemy I have encountered in my love of writing is me I guess. I have been too busy pursuing mundane things and much as I always have something burstling around in my head I always put it off till later and never get round to it..
Maybe I should get a voice recorder..sounds pretty appealing now that I have thought of it again for the umpteenth time..