It’s time to learn all about me! Cause you’ll never find another like me, and now I have a very strong feeling to play a Taylor Swift song. Which I will ignore for the moment. So what we will learn about me in this post? The history of how I got into writing. Nothing too annoying or long — I hope — because let’s face it, talking about myself makes me all fluttery. I never know where to start or, goodness, where to stop, and I am not the biggest fan of small talk.
So we’re going to take it back to when I was in the seventh grade. I will start off by saying I was not an avid reader. I was a casual reader, reading books every few weeks or so. I grew up outside. I am a nature child, by which I climb trees, play in the woods, chase rabbits, and lorded over boys instead of flirting with them. (Not much has changed in this regard.) Best of all, I had the imagination to fuel my fun. So, the only time I picked up a book to read was when I needed a little fuel before going off on the next adventure. Nothing about my personality or habits gave off the appearance of being a writer. What changed?
Well, I was a chatterbox. I mentioned how I didn’t like small talk, and if I couldn’t jump right to the point, I said nothing at all. Not to be mistaken in thinking I saw everyone as a friend. But if I liked you, I will speak and not shut up. And the best thing I like to talk about was stories. Retelling what I had either read or something that came up in my mind. I was going for the whole, speaking in front of a bonfire, and everyone gathered around me thing. Yup, I was trying to be a verbal storyteller, and I would have been okay with that. Until I was sitting in my seventh grade Social Studies class staring down at a blank sheet of paper.
I had a growing idea and about five distinct characters in my head. It felt as if I were being haunted. All that was left was to write it down, ignoring what happened in class that day. By the time class was over, I had two full pages filled. I went to my next class and kept writing. I wrote for the rest of the day, and when I returned to school, I had filled half the notebook. That was the very first story I ever wrote. I still have that notebook. I am equally horrified and amazed whenever I look at it. And I am proud to say I have become a much better writer.
After writing that short story, I began reading. Something awoke in me, and I had to know more, something, anything, I couldn’t tell you. I went from being a casual reader to a bookworm: Fantasy, Adventure, Romance, Science Fiction, Historical Fiction, Fairy Tales, Mythology, Folklore, and the Classics. The only thing I didn’t touch was Horror because my imagination didn’t need to take a turn in that direction. Otherwise, if it looked interesting, I would read it. I wrote short stories here and there when the mood struck. This did not mean I wanted to be a writer. I wasn’t thinking of this as a career choice. Not when it was so sporadic.
That ah-ha moment didn’t come until my last year of high school. I co-wrote an Isekai (a Japanese genre for accidentally traveling to another world) type story. When it was finished, I thought I could do this all the time, and that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. I moved forward from there.
