You have to admit that origin stories are in right now. Sure, they're for superheroes and not for ordinary people, but I thought that I would share mine. Not the how I came into this world one, because that's kind of strange and I was nearly born in a car due to Chicago rush hour, but the one that's more towards this blog. How I became a writer is sort of short and sweet, at least I thought, until I sat down to write this post. It seems when you're going to tell a bit about your life, your mind calls up really old dusty memories.
The first dusty memory comes from when I was in fifth grade at Robert Frost Elementary. I had a teacher named Mrs Black, at least that's what I think her name is, and there was a student newsletter of sorts. You could write things for it, in turn, and it was coming around to my turn. I didn't have anything interesting, save for a story about my cat, so in it went. As I'm looking over the memory, I feel like I stretched the truth vs just telling facts. I wish I knew where it was, as I never throw anything away, but I don't know where it is. If you're wondering why I think I stretched the truth, it's due to how I'm looking back on a young self. I felt ashamed about the story, which means it was probably a lie, but a well written one. That was my first step towards becoming a writer.
Around the same age, I read Elfquest and fell in love with the world. Along with my friends and younger brother, we created stories that put ourselves in the lives of the major characters. Or created our own and played out what we thought would happen. There was another game we would play where we all got sucked into a video game and had to get out somehow. It was a lot of fun and, even though word never got put to paper, it was still storytelling. I always looked forward to that, more than playing with video games, as it was easy making things up to play with.
Fast forward to the year 2000. I'm a freshman at Beloit College, making new friends, and one of them (I suspect Jenn) introduced me into the world of fanfiction. There are stories, of some kind of words put together in sentences to tell some sort of tale for you to read, but my writing / grammar is horrible compared to now. That's just how it is. You have to start somewhere and my start was in the world of badly written fanfiction. I graduated to better written fanfic and then into making my own worlds. This led into winning my first NaNo, which was a fantasy novel that took a lot of cliches and turned it into a novel, and I'm very happy for that.
A lot of unfinished fanfics and novels later (see trunking two posts back), I am at the place I am now. A finished novel with an editor to move towards publishing in some sort of fashion and trying to figure out what I am supposed to be writing now. I'm working on a fantasy novel - we'll talk about genre and being stuck in a later post (promise!) - and wondering if I should just go back to Mystery of the Dark's world and work on the second novel. It's an interesting problem to have, one I'll probably always have, but it is what it is.
Readers, what started you on your writing journey? Did you have a similar start or did you just jump in feet first?
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