The designation “drama queen” wasn’t around in the ’50’s and ’60’s, but it would have been a good description of me as a kid.
As I’ve written on Write Thinking, I had a vivid imagination in my childhood, and I loved to perform. I took ballet lessons for seven years, three of them as a soloist, and several years of piano lessons. I learned to play the flute (long forgotten). I was horse crazy and eventually saved up enough money to buy my first horse when I was 15. In Junior High, I got involved with drama club.
Back up a bit: I was ten, in the fifth grade, when the storyteller in me discovered the fun of entertaining others with words. I spun a tale about how my mom was born on a covered wagon coming west. Even in grade school I loved studying history, and here in southern Idaho a person can still see the ruts from the wagon wheels in the Oregon Trail. That made it easy to slip into that place in my imagination to weave my tale. I had no idea that down the road I would write many stories set in the Old West.
I became what I call a compulsive writer. I can’t recall ever thinking, “I want to be a writer when I grow up.” I just wrote. Wrote and wrote and wrote. On scraps of paper and on binder covers and in tiny diaries with those itsy-bitsy sized keys. When I wasn’t reading a book or pretending to be a horse or entertaining in one form or another or fantasizing in my head, I usually was writing something. It was part of my every day world.
Except for the Idaho part and ballet lessons (one of my early dreams that never came true), you could just about be telling the story of my childhood!
My friend Sharon was like you. We used to have to go to the cloakroom to practice our flashcards (this was in a country school with several grades in one room — teacher had to find some way to keep us busy when he was dealing with the other grades!). We couldn’t wait, so Sharon could tell us the next installment of her made-up story of “Pete and Ann.”
I grew up making up stories in my head. I’d also change the end of movies and television shows. Or instead of falling asleep counting sheep, I’d make up stories.
I thought everyone did that…it wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized not everyone did.