Marcia C Gerhardt

I was born in Texas and will always be a Texan. Not that I will live here forever, but I believe in the old adage, “You can take the girl out of Texas but not Texas out of the girl.”

When I was in grade school, my teachers somehow got word that I liked to make up stories. So when the classroom grew restless, the boys shooting spitballs at each other, the girls giggling loudly and passing notes to each other, I was inevitably called to the front of the class, the teacher shouting for the class to settle down. That I was going to tell them a story they had never heard before. Whew! Talk about pressure.

So I began and quickly realized that in order to keep the attention of twenty hyper kids, you had to capture their attention with your very first sentence and sprinkle throughout contentious arguments and impossible obstacles for the imaginary characters I was struggling to portray. I didn’t always succeed. But I learned.

When I write now, be it a novel or a play or a poem, I remind myself not to fall so much in love with my subject(s) that I ramble on in complete self-indulgence. My current audience is not in grade school, but adults grow impatient too, and within the time it takes to watch a television commercial, readers deserve to know their attention is worth the effort.