I realized while sitting at the coffee shop today that though this blog is called “The Creative’s Mind.” I very rarely talk about how I got here, well I’m going to try to change that now…
Exposition
I’m not really sure there is a concrete starting point for when writing became a steady part of my life, but the first story I remember writing was in first grade and it was a school assignment. It was a fable I titled “Why the Grasshopper is green.” I don’t really remember much about the story or the lesson I was trying to teach in it, but I do remember writing it so clearly it left it’s mark.
Rising Action
In middle school I was creating things a lot more often. I met a friend who was into making comics so I tried my hand at it and created a series called The World As We Know It and it starred an anthropomorphic Twinkie (because I couldn’t then and still can’t draw..) whose name was Twinkie Man…he went on space faring adventures with his robot friend and fought off an evil mad scientist…it was weird but it was fun and I was creating.
Middle school was also when I started writing poems. I wrote them as a way to ask the questions I didn’t know how to answer. I wrote them to understand the emotions that were too big for me to understand. I wrote them to figure myself out. Poetry for most of my life was my roadmap to exploring who I was, and who I hoped to be.
I also co-wrote a short story with a friend in middle school about a guy who robbed a McDonald’s with a squirt gun. A lot of the stuff I did in middle school was out there and weird but all of it was helping me lay the foundation to become a better writer.
Rising Action pt.2
My high school experience was interesting I had a small group of friends and as I talked about in On The Island of Misfit Toys blog post a bunch of misfits. I lost friends and gained them, I moved, I grew, I had my heart broken and healed, and through it all I wrote. Still at this point mostly poetry and still for the same reason as when I was in middle school. I didn’t know who I was but as long as I could get my thoughts and feelings, my strengths and shortcomings down on paper I could get through any given day.
In my sophomore year of high school I had a teacher who probably deserves the most credit for instilling any amount of confidence in my writing when he read an essay I wrote for an assignment aloud to the class and praised it.
Later that year I had to write a short story with a partner…Well my partner was picked and we discussed what kind of story we wanted to tell..and he never wrote his part…the night before it was due I wrote the whole thing by myself. An 8 paragraph story about a nuclear war. I got a 98 on it and the same teacher compared it to a Ray Bradbury story. This is when I realized I might have a talent for writing and starting writing more poetry and no longer just to figure myself out but to try to get better, to maybe one day work towards being published…
My college years were where I really started to push past poetry. I wrote a 9 page supernatural demon story, I started a Tumblr where I’d share my writing, I joined Wattpad, DeviantArt, I was pushing as hard as I could. But despite getting that confidence in high school that I could write I was riddled with doubt and low self esteem so despite all those accounts and all that writing most of those profiles ended up with a few pieces I was really proud of but then abandoned. I only recently started posting on my Wattpad again. And through all that writing I could never actually finish a project. I would write 10,000 words, 15,000 words…and then I’d get stuck. I reached out to authors I followed on social media for help and was surprised to get an answer from Maureen Johnson author of books like 13 Little Blue Envelopes, The Shades of London Series and more recently the Truly Devious series. Her answer helped me push on despite being afraid I sucked and would never amount to anything.
And then I found NaNoWriMo. The first NaNoWriMo I ever attempted I lost only getting to about 20,000 words in fact I wouldn’t win a NaNo for 3 years. In 2015 I finally won, In 2015 I finally had a majority of a book. I have since gone on to win 3 of the last 4 (I would have been 4 or 4 if not for a bad case of pneumonia 2 years ago…)
In 2016 I decided to start blogging as a way to get my thoughts out, much like poetry in the past, this blog has been a spattering of pieces of me, my thoughts and my hopes and my struggles as I still try to piece myself together.
Even after finishing NaNoWriMo after NaNoWriMo I had never finished writing a book. I never had written The End on a full length novel and I didn’t until a mix of determination and Chuck Wendig’s book The Kick-Ass Writer did I finally accomplish what all the years of writing had been leading up too I wrote the end…
Since then I’ve fully drafted 2 more books and am editing and rewriting the second of those…
I have not yet reached the climax of my writing journey, that’s why this blog post will end amid the rising action, because that’s where I stand. In elementary school and middle school I laid the groundworks and found out I loved writing. Through high school and college I used writing to cope with changes and to try to understand myself and I still do that to this day, mostly through this blog.
Everything I write brings me closer to my goal. The peak is still far above me, but it’s always good to look back on where you’ve been and to remember all the people who helped you get where you are. I am eternally grateful to everyone who has taken the time to help me get here. To all the people who have believed in me. The work isn’t over yet, but I’ll get there. I’ll stand on that peak one day. I owe it to them, and I owe it to myself.
The cynical optimist 