I have been writing fiction for eleven years. I'm not very old, nor do I think I'm experienced, but the fact remains that I have an addiction to writing. It started when I was in middle school and my friends were all playing on the same website where you could choose an avatar and use it to walk around in a virtual town to meet other avatars. It was fun, but not exactly my type of thing. However, I stayed on the website to keep in contact with friends after school (because back then not everyone had a cellphone). While I was on the website, I began to explore what other things I could do and stumbled upon the forums section. To my amazement, I discovered a hidden world where thousands of people went to write stories with one another. It was rather exciting, so I jumped in head first and began writing.
When I first started writing, I joined low-level writing forums where you could write one line that said your character moved and that was enough for others in the group to go off of. My spelling was horrible, my punctuation was nonexistent, and my verb tenses would have probably confused myself if I ever proofread back then. What my point is: I was a horrible writer (if you could even call me that). I wrote like that until I finished middle school, and I'm not proud of anything I did, but it's where I started.
After I started high school, I began to write more and more. I practiced punctuation and grammar more as well, thanks to English classes, and I was able to read more literature to understand different writing styles. So I thought I had enough knowledge in the world to write my first novel. It was based on a story I did online, so it wasn't anything original, but I wrote it. I completed thirteen chapters by handwriting it all in the back of my school binder during down time in classes. I was a sophomore and felt like I was unstoppable, so I showed my friends my story. Then the criticism came in.
It was the first time someone ever told me that my writing wasn't great, and that the characters I created were unbelievable. I was hurt and defensive, but mainly hurt. I took those chapters and hid them away in a drawer where I couldn't see them. I then forgot about the novel altogether until my senior year when I was moving and found the stash of papers. I read the chapters over and couldn't help but laugh because everything my friends had told me was the complete truth.
I didn't write another novel after that one, but I did continue to write during my free time. I had made online friends through that website and began talking with them over Skype. We created stories of our own and did our writing on Skype together. I started to see myself getting better as a writer, but I was afraid to do anything on my own. For so many years I had written with others, and I was worried that if I tried to write anything on my own it would end up like my first attempt.
Then I entered a college fiction writing class. It took a lot of self-convincing to sign up for the class, but I did it. And it was in that classroom, at eight in the morning, that I was forced to be on my own in writing. Not only that, I was going to be criticized by every student in that classroom. The professor had things set up that by the end of the semester everyone would write at least eight pages for a short story to be reviewed by the entire class. When it came to my turn for my short story to be reviewed, I was beyond nervous, but as the reviews started coming in I found that nearly everyone in the class had liked what I wrote.
It was a strange experience, but I was happy that I did it and received constructive criticism. Writing for that class has given me the courage to continue writing short stories. I'm not afraid anymore and have even been thinking of writing another novel, one from my own ideas. I think that would be something I could call an accomplishment.
