Story Time: How I Became a Writer

Hello everyone! 

Today, I wanted to tell you the story of how I came to fancy myself a writer. I really can thank my dad for getting me started. My dad started reading Harry Potter to my sister and I when we were about three, and that bore in us a passion for made-up stories.

Stories with Blue

Throughout our elementary school years, my sister––we'll call her Blue––and I would improvise stories together aloud. It started out with inserting ourselves into Hogwarts, then we made up families and had them go on misadventures together, then there were love stories. I always had to be the boy Blue's character fell in love with because she was the main character in our stories 90% of the time. Other stories included colonial America stories, the origins of my Kelisia & Skyr novel (I was actually the main character in that one! I was still the male love interest though...). You name it, we did a story about it.

Those were good times; I miss those days.

Enter Eragon

Blue and I were homeschooled growing up, so we often had most of the day to play and imagine on our own. My favorite pastime in those years was reading. I kind of skipped a couple stages of reading development; I went from The Hungry Hungry Caterpillar to Bailey School Kids chapter books without ever touching Curious George and other books of that level. My next jump was from Bailey School Kids straight to Christopher Paolini's Eragon...when I was nine. Yeah, I was that kid.

Eragon opened my eyes to a side of fantasy that I didn't know existed. Sure, my dad had read us Lord of the Rings (when I was 5...not sure what he was thinking on that one), but I never understood otherworldly fantasy until I read Eragon. I had never realized how amazingly cool dragons were, or that people could bond with them and become friends.

That day, I decided what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wanted to be a DRAGON RIDER!

Well, no, not really––I knew that dragon riders don't exist. But I dreamed of it and drew a picture of myself and my two best friends at the time as dragon riders and gave us made up names. I also drew two other dragons and riders to be friends with us. I lost those pictures soon after and completely forgot they existed.

*These aren't actually the original drawings;
those are lost forever. 

*These are the second iteration
from when I was 12.

*I know these are bad.
I was 12 and couldn't draw. 

Three years later, I rediscovered them in a box under my bedside table. That's when my creative gears started to turn. I started imagining scenarios of these characters interacting with each other, and eventually, I started writing them down with the intention of maybe creating a short story or two.

One year and 100 pages later, I had the first draft of my Circle of Dragons on my hands. It was complete and total crap, so I started rewriting the stories and making them more cohesively into a novel.

Six years later, that 100 page draft has been separated into four different novels (in varying stages of completion). The first 8 page story alone became the basis for the (currently) 200ish page Pieces of Silver.

In December of my freshman year of college, I discovered Wattpad. A friend who also liked to write had told me about it years earlier, but I finally decided to look it up. I thought it was really cool, so I started putting some stuff up on it. I didn't really want to put Circle of Dragons on there because it was my life's work. However, I got interested in fan fiction and Death Note around the same time; so, I started writing Young L: the Triebome Murder Case, which was my first attempt at fan fiction.

Then I took a poetry class and a creative writing class during the next couple semesters, so I had some actual original material I was okay with putting up on Wattpad. I also wrote a couple articles for The Nerd Daily, but I fell away from that pretty fast.

Conclusion

So, yeah, that pretty much brings me to where I am today. I'm taking a lighter load next semester, so I'm hoping to get a lot of writing and editing done. Hopefully, I'll be able to send Pieces of Silver off pretty soon after I graduate, but we'll have to see if life throws me any curveballs.

If you made it this far, thanks so much for reading!