Writing has been a part of who I am for as long as I can remember. I've always been creative. I've always yearned for adventure. I've always wanted to live out my life like the action hero of a movie. When I was young I desperately wanted to be an archaeologist. Why? Because Indiana Jones is horrifically misleading as to what an archaeologist is and does. Once I realized that my expectations of discovering ancient civilizations, fighting for my life against magical beings and walking away from a massive explosion without flinching weren't all that realistic, I found another way to live out my adventures. I began to write.
I don't know exactly when I began writing but I do know it was at a fairly young age. I've always been a creative person and ideas are never hard for me to come up with. All the way until about my eighth grade year I didn't have casual access to a computer and that limited me to writing all of my stories by hand. I had a lot of good ideas (At least my younger self thought they were good) but I was stuck writing them on paper. That took a lot of effort and time and organizational skills that I didn't have. I had a lot of ideas started but the number of finished ideas and stories was significantly less.
Them, for my eighth grade graduation present, my dad bought me a laptop. We didn't have Wi-Fi at my mom's house so that summer left me with no choice but to write. Write I did. That summer with absolutely nothing else to do, resulted in about hundreds of pages of writing. I hardly ever actually finished a story but writing was so much easier I just couldn't bring myself to stop. This was when I really began to express myself and find my own writing style.
Then I discovered something called fanfiction. I had just gotten into the show Supernatural and oh, man, was I excited. I fell in love with the characters and the universe that was laid out before me. There were just so many possibilities that all of it could be used for! So, again, I began writing. I feel like writing fanfiction changed me and my style. It's good for you in some ways. It definitely makes you think about your characters and get to know them just to make sure that your version of them is close enough to the show's version. In a way it's a bit liberating to have a world to work with that's already built for you. Coming up with your own world can be exhausting in so many ways. But, at the same time, I feel like it sort of pushed back the progress I'd made. I wasn't being quite as original as I had been and I found myself not wanting to put in the effort to create my own worlds to work in any more. It was hard to balance it out.
Soon after that I became very busy and didn't write as much. Now I hardly write for myself at all and it's probably clear to see. But writing is always a work in progress, there's always something you can make better or work on to keep your mind sharp and your skills honed. I'm really trying to get myself back into writing. Creative writing is an amazing way to express yourself and that's very important. It's been an major part of who I am and I don't ever want that to change.
