Ever since I was a little girl I've loved making up stories. I would entertain myself for hours by constructing my own worlds on paper and becoming friends with people and animals that I'd created and which seemed quite real to me. I scribbled thousands of words down on scratch paper and filled several boxes with rough drafts of my books which were each hundreds of pages long. I never knew how to end my stories and I got so attached to my characters that I never wanted to conclude and stop writing about them so I usually just put away my books for awhile without an ending. When I was little I had no desire to share these stories with other people and the few times that relatives or friends get a hold of my writing it was very unpleasant and awkward. I didn't like it when others made suggestions or comments about the people and plots that were very close to my heart and which seemed nearly flawless in my eyes. I was defensive and stubborn when it came to things that I believed myself good at, and to have people suggest that I had a far way to go to be a good writer made me feel hurt and angry. The worst thing was when people would read my writing out loud and laugh at it. When I heard the stories I'd written read out loud they sounded weird and silly. I loved them when I read them to myself and thought they were very well done, but when I heard them read aloud, especially by older people who found them amusing in a way I had not intended them to be, it was very embarrassing and disagreeable and made me not as pleased with my precious stories as I had been before. It was not until years later when I went back and read these stories that I understood the laughter and comments. Viewing these kid creations from a more mature view myself, I saw why they had appeared funny and flawed to other people and I also understood that most of these people had not intended to be mean or critical. They just saw my creations from a different viewpoint than I had, and wanted to help me improve them. When I got older I began to wish very much to share my writing and to desired to become a really good writer and to have my writing read and loved by people whom I had never even met before. I began to have the strong desire to be an author, but I also started to see just how flawed my writing was and to feel extremely frustrated that I could not write better. For awhile I gave into the frustration and stopped writing, but finally I put it behind me and grabbed a hold of the determination that God had put inside of me to pursue a career as an author. The first step I had to take was to learn how to revise and to overcome my strong dislike of it. I never rewrote any of my stories when I was young. Revising seemed to me, like destroying a perfectly good story, or picking apart a person and telling them they weren't good enough the way they were. Not until I became an English major at GC did I come to see the beauty and importance of revising and to see it as the way to make a story truly come alive and blossom to a fuller degree than it ever could, if left alone after the first draft. Revising became an exciting challenge to me, as a way of making the stories I wrote, crackle and snap and jump out at people so that they couldn't put my books down. (To be continued in, "Five Reasons Why I Love to Write...")