Ten or twelve years ago, long before I ever considered venturing out into the blogging world; actually, before I even knew what a blog was, I sat down with a yellow legal pad and two Bic ink pens. I had no thought of one day pretending to be a writer.

It was summertime. I was vacationing in a borrowed house on the Gulf Coast of Florida. There was no TV. No theme parks. The sandy beach a couple blocks away wasn’t even white. It was more shell fragments than sand. The sunsets were remarkable. The solitude was perfect.

I sat down at the end of a comfy couch, a hot cup of coffee on the end table near my right hand. In the dark of the morning the lamp light over my shoulder was warm and inviting.

What I remember most is how difficult it was to put the first word on the paper. I would touch the notepad with that ballpoint, think long and hard for a few minutes, set the pen down, and take another sip of coffee. For the first two hours nothing happened.

What stops most people from writing is that they think they have nothing to write about. They imagine that when a real writer sits down, the words just flow like water from a hose. They cannot picture themselves as a Mark Twain or a Margaret Mitchell.

This is true. You are not Mark Twain. You probably don’t have a “Gone with the Wind” in you. But that doesn’t mean you can’t write.

Writing doesn’t have to be a novel. Writing doesn’t have to be poetry. It doesn’t have to be funny. It doesn’t even have to be good. Lord, if writing had to be all those things, I wouldn’t be doing it.

I’m no expert, but here’s what you do. At least, this is what I did. I decided to write to my kids. My motivation, sitting there on that couch, was to tell them a few stories.

If you sit down to write a best seller and your perceived audience is the world, you won’t write. I certainly couldn’t write that way. I’d be too scared to write. All those people. All that criticism. All the mockery. It’s enough to make a fella mentally constipated.

So, when I finally just imagined telling my kids a story about their grandparents, the words came.

Marion and I got the chance to visit with Allen Levi the other day. Allen has been a writer for a long time. He invited us to visit with him in his work room at the local library. As a musical artist, he has written too many songs to count. He writes poetry. He wrote a book as a testimony to his brother. And most recently, he completed his first novel.

If you haven’t read “Theo of Golden,” you should.

We went there so he could sign Marion’s copy of Theo. If he reads this, he’ll blush in his “awe shucks” kind of way, but visiting with him was like being in the presence of writer royalty. Allen is generous in heart and deep in appreciation for life. Whatever beauty and inspiration you find in his words (songs, poetry, books) is the same you get from his conversation. He is the genuine article.

“When I write,” he says, “I have a couple of people in mind. People I care about. All I really want is for them to read this.” He touches a three-ring notebook on the table that holds the pages of his sequel to Theo. “If they are challenged by this story, and they get something out of it, I’ll be more than happy, even if I never sell another book.”

This is the gilded take-away folks. We all have someone to whom we are connected in this life. We all have someone we are going to leave behind one of these days, someone who will carry with them a memory of our time on this earth.

The written word captures those memories like nothing else. You can tell your story a thousand times. You can reminisce around the holidays and enjoy the laughter and the tears. You can talk about your life’s experiences again and again. But the spoken words float away like driftwood on the ocean. They disappear with time. And the memories are forgotten.

I wish my dad had written down his stories. Not so much the thousands of funny tales he told, though I wish I could remember half of them. But I wish he had written about his time in the Navy, or about the times we spent rabbit hunting, or maybe about the time he played baseball in Griffin, or what it was like to be father, or what was on his mind as he watched mama dwindle away at the hands of dementia.

I have hundreds of pictures of him and mama. I have old home movies. I have my own memories. But I don’t have one single word he ever wrote. If I did, I’d have the priceless treasure of a lifetime.

A lot has happened with my writing since that week in Florida. I think I wrote down maybe five or six stories that I wanted my kids to have some day. The words were not polished. The grammar stunk. The misspellings would have embarrassed my teachers. But that’s all I had. And for the time being, that was enough.

That notepad sat in a folder stuffed down in a plastic grocery sack on the floor of my closet for over six years before I decided to do something with it. Even then, when I went back to it, my only goal was to type up what I had written. I wanted to clean it up a little bit and put it away so that, one day, I could give it to my kids.

Somehow, out of that, Georgia Bred was born.

Allen said something to me during our visit at the library that I’ve known, but to hear someone else say it made it come back to me. He said, “Your writing? What a blessing your kids will have one of these days. If they don’t know it now, one of these days they will.”

He understands what I’m doing. Even though my writing has turned into something I never dreamed about, I still think of my kids when I write.

What I write will one day tell them who I am. I have tried to be honest in all of my sorrow and laughter, all of my fears and joys, all of my doubts and beliefs; even in all of my vulnerable and ridiculous moments of life. Sometimes I wonder if I should have left some things out.

But it’s all in there. Every word that I put on paper will live long after I’m gone. I’m not writing a best seller. I don’t have a publishing contract. My grammar still stinks. I still can’t spell. But that doesn’t keep me from writing.

Which is why you should write. Leave behind your own stories. No excuses.

Be inspired to make your memories last forever.