Revisiting Your Past To Help Your Writing

You ever wonder when you started believing in something, talking with a certain twang (or without it), wearing a specific brand of jeans? If you're like me, some of those details have vanished from recallable memory.

That information, of course, is up there somewhere in my brain, but I can't seem to find it. Think of my memory like a large house with several levels, rooms and hallways. Each room has certain pieces of memories. My problem is that I don't know which floor or down which hall those memories now reside, and even if I did, the doors to the rooms are locked and I've misplaced the keys. 

Come to think of it, those rooms might be so cluttered that those memories might even be packed away in unlabeled boxes in those rooms. Add to this the idea that my memory is more like an endless track of houses in a neighborhood as vast as the horizon on the Texas plains. Each day I keep adding more boxes and more houses.

 I tweeted this the other day:

When's the last time you visited your childhood home and reflected? If you're a writer, you should and take pen and paper.

As an educator, I know that I am who I am because of all I have experienced - especially early in those particularly exciting developmental years of life. My exercise is to rummage through that part of me that existed what seems like a lifetime ago: before I was a husband, father, educator, college graduate, etc., etc. 

I know it will affect (and help) my writing. I just don't know exactly how. That is the exciting part.