When I was a kid, I loved writing short stories. I would write the story and draw pictures with it and then bind them together to make a book. I was always so proud of them. With school, English was my favorite subject, because we got to do creative writing projects a chance for me to have fun. As a kid I wanted to be other things when I grew up. Being an author was never a thought to me because as a young kid there is no encouragement to be an author, no hype for it like being an actor or something.
When I entered the eighth grade in a new school, I had a dream. I can’t remember all of it but I remember sitting on a clear pond like I’m sitting on a mirror. I then fall through it like I’m on a lift and it goes down slowly, but I don’t fall into the water. I fall into a tunnel and the pond is above me like a window. My clothes also change to a traditional Japanese temple maiden outfit. I climb out of the tunnel to a new world, and that’s all I can remember. From that dream I got the idea to turn it into a story with the support of my friend. She was writing a story and encouraged me to write.
It started off very rough. My Main Character’s name was Kaya, and she had to go to this other world and find magical jewelry. Each one had a different power. She had three friends helping her and two bad guys chasing her. Once I got to the chapter involving the plant power, I would become stuck. I would go back and rewrite the previous chapters and come back to the same chapter and never move on from it. This continued through jr. high and high school. I would take a break from writing and return later, but I continued to never get passed that one chapter. Of course school work got in the way of writing and other school activities but I would find the time to write but there were times I didn’t want to. I was feeling a bit discouraged.
During high school I had very little confidence in myself (like most teens) and it affected my story. I had no confidence in the story being great. My friends would read through it and say it was good and give critiques but I was never happy with how it turned out. I was even afraid of others reading my story because I wasn’t happy with it yet. That’s what upset me. I enjoyed writing, but my story was another thing. I marked it off as a hobby, never to publish it until I was happy with it.
In senior year teachers asked those stupid questions, “What are you going to go to college for? What job do you want after school?” I did want to do something involving writing. We had an assignment where we had to shadow someone in the field we wanted to join the workforce in. I wanted to shadow an author, but in McCook, NE, I knew none. So I shadowed someone in our local newspaper. I arrived there and was with someone for a bit and then passed to another, and then to another. I learned nothing that helped spark my interest to be a writer.
Another event that happened to me had a different effect on me and my writing. My drama teacher came to me saying I could sign up for a script writing contest. She had confidence in my writing. So I gave it a shot I did many rewrites and editing and came up with something the class wanted to perform. Unfortunately, that was against the rules. So I entered it and won nothing. I was sad at the time but I also learned something from it. Just because someone didn’t like it doesn’t mean someone else wouldn’t. This happened around the time senior thespians could direct plays if they wanted to. Since I was a senior and wanted to try it out, I wrote out a play real quick. The students wished to do the one I entered, but both events were happening at the same time and like I said it was against the rules, so I wrote a different play. No one took it seriously and the whole performance was a disaster in my opinion because no one to it seriously until they found me crying about later in practice. That event destroyed my thought of directing. Even though I learned something from one of these events I still had doubts, I had to like my story first before letting it out into the world where someone else would like it.
I continued to edit my story and continued to doubt my writing. The path I wished to take was too hard of a climb because, without me knowing it, I was making it difficult. Then I was pushed onto another path after graduation.
More in part two.