Writing, Analyzed

I've been writing for a while.


I know. That was a very blunt and uninteresting way to start this blog. But bluntness is the best kind of truth. Or something like that.


So, like I said, I've been writing a while. I believe I started at age eight or nine, and I was very into celebrity romances. I was a little girl who longed for a romance (or, at least, what I thought was romance at age eight), and since I couldn't get that, I turned to the next best thing: the love lives of celebrities. More specifically, the love lives of one Joe Jonas and Demi Lovato.


Yeah, I also watched Disney Channel alot.


So, for a couple years, I wrote Jemi (as it was known) fanfiction... and I was terrible at it. I have countless stories just taking up space in my hard drive that absolutely suck. I didn't indent, so my stories were basically one big paragraph. I didn't add any kind of descriptions, or sensory details, or personal feelings for the protagonists. My grammar was atrocious, my spelling was laughable, and don't even get me started on the story lines.


And yet I can't get rid of them. They prove to be amazing pick-me-ups when I have the writer's blues. They show me how much progress I made as an author in a couple years.

Soon, I began to grow away from Jemi fanfiction, because I finally came to my senses about how ridiculous it all was. I stopped writing for a while, picked up some tricks and got better at it. When I began to write again in sixth grade, they were all original stories, and they were better than the sappy love stories I had in mind for my celebrity fanfiction. They all ranged from a girl who was kidnapped and fell in love with her captor (totally realistic, right?), to a kid spy who had to save the world from an evil dude who turned out to be her birth father. (Sound familiar? "Luke, I am your father.") It was through these stories that I began to develop a writing style.

I also came to a realization when I was writing these stories. Ever heard of the phrase, write about what you know? It was because of that tiny rule that I wrote such crappy stories back when I was an eight/nine-year-old fanfictioner. (is that a word?) All I knew back then was: school is boring, every highschooler has a car, every highschool has linoleum floors, and everybody likes Converse. As you can tell, most of those facts I got from movies. 

But that wasn't the realization I came to. I realized that authors are the biggest copy-cats in the world.

We copy scenes from our own lives, like that awkward barrier you accidentally put between you and your crush by portraying your feelings by hitting him when your were in fourth grade. Or the time or cried your eyes  out back in fourth (or was it fifth?) grade in front of the only guy who liked you because of a skinned knee and your dad had to carry you back to your house, fireman-style.

We copy alot to properly describe certain feelings, like love or betrayal, depression or excitement, and to do that, we have to feel those firsthand ourselves. But we don't copy from just our own lives. We sometimes copy from things in the news, or from our best friend's crazy stories, because her life is more exciting than yours.

And that's okay. It's all part of the job. I just recently got a great new idea for a story by reading a random blog that I stumbled upon here on blogspot. And I'm not ashamed... very much. 

That's why there aren't many teenage published authors out there, because when you're young, you haven't lived enough to weave a story out of your experiences. 

I've been writing awhile. And I'm going to do it for a long time in the future. And hopefully, some day, I'll do it just enough to cross PUBLISH A BOOK off my bucket list.