Jay Williams

As a kid, I was terrible in English class (btw, I did great in my first German class). I absolutely hated having to diagram sentences and figure out what a past participle had to do with what I said. However, I loved telling stories. So it wasn’t until I got to my first year of college that I ran into an English teacher that understood me. After my first writing assignment he called me in and talked to me and wondered what was going on. I must have said something clever, because after that he told the class that our writing assignments would have two grades: one for grammar/structure the other for content. In other words, while other students wrote impressive papers that got every gerund and comma in perfect alignment, my stories excited people and kept them reading. And thanks to that English teacher, I not only passed his class with a B (thanks to his new grading style), I was inspired to try writing for fun instead of just for class.

When I first began writing I wrote everything down on a notepad, then would type it so that it was readable to others (I have atrocious penmanship). Eventually I could afford a computer so I would still use the notepad, but with a computer I no longer had to master “whiteout” or correction tape. Whew. Nowadays, I seem to take my iPad to coffee shops and write down the story there, but then transfer it to my computer where I flesh it all out. I still occasionally will wake up in the middle of the night and write something down on paper. Invariably though I wake up the next morning and have a hell of a time reading what I wrote. Maybe I should put my iPad next to the bed.