Apparently, I Just Never Stopped

Since you’ve been reading some of my blogs, I thought I should probably introduce myself.

Hi. I’m Dennis.

I started writing sometime around the fifth grade. I would write short stories and share them with my friends. I don’t remember thinking much about it at the time. I just thought it was fun.

Fast-forward about fifty years, and one of those same friends asked me, “Hey, do you remember that story you wrote about Big Bertha?”

Oh my gosh. I did.

It was a detective story about the two of us chasing the criminal mastermind Big Bertha around the city. I use the term criminal mastermind somewhat generously. We were fifth graders, after all.

What surprised me even more was learning that his mother had typed the story up and kept it all these years. She didn’t just type it. She didn’t throw it away.

She kept it. There is something wonderful about that. Apparently, even when I was ten or eleven years old, somebody thought one of my stories was worth saving. I’ve been dabbling in writing ever since.

Along the way, I spent some time in the military and most of my adult life working as a nurse. I’ve also tried photography, painting, drawing, karate, scuba diving, and even jumping out of a perfectly good airplane.

I’ve enjoyed all of them. But after everything, I always come back to writing.

For most of my life, I’ve called writing my favorite hobby. As I get closer to retirement, though, I’ve started looking at it differently. I want this to be my job.

Weird, right?

I can’t make a living at it yet. Maybe someday I will. Maybe in a few years I’ll retire from one career and begin another. Writer, I like the sound of that.

Somewhere along the way, I also began to understand why writing has stayed with me when so many other hobbies came and went.

Writing gives us a way to capture a version of a moment and preserve it. Maybe it’s something funny that happened with my friend Jerry that his grandkids might read someday. Maybe it’s a moment with the guys that would otherwise disappear into one of those conversations nobody remembers ten years later.

Or maybe it’s something more difficult, the loss of a favorite aunt who lived with us for many years. A moment in your life you didn’t realize was important until it was already gone. They’re all worth something. They’re the special moments, the ordinary ones, and the everyday moments in people’s lives that we don’t realize are precious until later.

Of course, I also write fantasy. There are dragons, prophecies, questionable decisions, people carrying swords who probably shouldn’t be trusted with them, and entire places that have never existed anywhere except inside my head. 

But maybe those stories are doing the same thing, preserving something.

A thought. A feeling. A friendship. A fear. A little piece of the person who wrote it. Maybe that’s one of the reasons I keep coming back to writing.

I’ve been doing it since the fifth grade. Apparently, I just never stopped.

Dennis D. Montoya
Stories Forged in Ink & Ash

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