Page Turning Books: Leandi Cameron

Leandi Cameron – Writing to Me is

Writing to me is …

by Leandi Cameron

Writing is our basis – without it, we cannot learn and our intellectual capacity is judged upon our ability to write clearly and concisely.

However, it is also a tool to express ourselves, and journalists still, today, often create new words, as Shakespeare created hundreds of words as one of the greatest and most prolific writers of all times.

Writing is also an important part of our community, business and every day functioning as one of our largest methods of communication, next to speaking and body language.

With such an important function in our society, how can writing not affect me as intensely as it has for the past 18 years?

Writing is a passionate drive towards being something other than the usual. It isn’t easy to write – many people wish that they could have the ability to write, and simply can’t put two sentences together.

However, to me, writing is something that can be learnt. With a lot of passion, hard work and the ability to learn, everyone can become a writer. No one said it would be Shakespeare, but if it makes you happy, and you love it while you are doing it, then nothing in the world can stop you from making your thoughts come alive.

Technology has made it much easier I admit, but when I started writing, my main method of capturing my thoughts were with the now ‘pre-historic’ method of pen and paper. I still have all my writings from when I was at high school.

Somehow it is nostalgic to look back at the work I produced when I was still a child. My feelings so much more heightened, and my ability to pour my feelings onto paper so much more prevalent.

However, today, I wouldn’t say that this has changed much – it just works differently – no hormones to make my broken heart write down poems of love and loss in the most intense ways that I did when I was younger.

But, today, I still lose myself in writing; I still explore different parts of my psyche and I still escape into a creative space and time where only I exist – with my multiple characters that have been yearning to scratch through the surface on a daily basis.

They are always there, talking to me, telling me what they want to say. Some of them have stronger voices than others, and, therefore, they end up on my written pages as my protagonists or lead characters. They tell me their stories as I go along – I never know what is going to happen next, until it actually happens, and then even I am surprised. It can sometimes be scary, as I never know whether my story would have an ending – some stories don’t have an ending – yet, and they rest in a special place on my computer, where I leave them be, until they decide to tell me the rest of their tales.

Even though writing is the place where I escape, it is also the place from which I sometimes feel I need to escape from – I work as a full-time journalist and newspaper editor – where is my freedom from the love I have for the written word?

It somehow, sometimes, becomes a love-hate relationship, a suffocating place that I cannot escape, and a life-sucking space that I simply cannot say no to. What can I do to find peace?

Even so, I cannot move away, it doesn’t matter that writing and I have become so reliant upon each other – we have become one – we are twins, and without each other we are merely ordinary. Writing makes me who I am – different and unable to be silent as my mind always talks to me, and I wouldn’t want it any other way.

Leandi Cameron is an award-winning journalist and newspaper editor. She is also the author of young-adult paranormal fantasy novel, A Tale of the Other Kind: A Therian Novel, which is the first novel of a series. For more information visit www.leandicameron.com.