In middle school, I watched someone use a pen to create an amazing piece of artwork. No erasing, no going back and changing, but with the permanence of a ballpoint pen, I watched a seventh grade girl bring a character to life. The little anime character’s eyes even matched—and if you have ever attempted to draw something, you know the difficulty in getting eyes to match.
As I watched the pen scrawling across the page, I asked her if she could teach me to do that, to which she responded with, “Do what?”
“Draw like that.”
She shrugged. “These are just doodles.”
Coming from someone who could barely accomplish drawing a smiley face at this point in her life, I was completely flabbergasted. She said she’d been drawing since she could pick up a pen, and I sighed, because I felt like it was too late for me to start that hobby. I’d never be as talented as someone who practiced from the start.
As I was growing up, I met lots of people like this: People that picked up a pen as a child and just started drawing until they were good at it, developing this muscle memory that I couldn’t possibly attempt to understand. The way they learned to write letters was ingrained in their learning of drawing.
I met people who did the same thing with other hobbies: Painting, sports, singing, musical instruments, etc. I felt that I had missed something in childhood because there was nothing that I started so young and was now a master at. I’ve never met someone who wasn’t good at something because they picked something up at four years old and made a point to become great at it.
I was very discouraged by this for a long time. I felt like a late bloomer, a late starter that would never have something to start. Even playing softball, there were girls that had been playing longer. I was eventually able to catch up through sheer dedication, but even still, I played catch up in my first few years.
My freshman year of college, I no longer had softball. I had spent 10 years trying to catch up to girls that had been playing their whole lives, and I eventually did. My last three years of softball, I caught up with the muscle memory, but now that I was starting a new journey without the one talent I had found, I felt left behind like I had in middle school watching that girl “doodle” artistic brilliance.
Then I let someone read a rough draft of something I had written.
They asked, “Where’d you learn to do this?”
“Do what?”
“Write like this.”
I shrugged and in that moment, I suddenly realized something that I should have seen a long time ago.
I have been writing fiction from the time I could pick up a pen. I have been reading and researching the English language for as long as I can remember. In third grade, I wrote my first story about a family of mice. In fourth grade, I researched names and name genealogy in order to develop character names that were correct to the time period and place. In sixth grade, I planned out my first novel (which I never finished). In eighth grade, I wrote my first poem. In 10th grade, I read the thesaurus and the dictionary purely because I wanted to expand my vocabulary. In 12th grade, I took my first creative writing class and realized how much I did and didn’t know about writing. In my first year of college, I took my first college fiction writing class, and in my second year, I became a published author at 20 years old.
I spent so long looking for my talent, looking for something I could be good at, and all along I had something. I learned softball, and there’s still a big part of writing that I’m learning. But for the first time, I feel like I am pursuing a dream that is less about catching up and more about improving upon what I know.
