Writing 101 Living the Dream

Is the pen mightier than the sword? I believe it to be. No matter how someone may threaten me with a blade, I don't think they could indefinitely force me to live a certain way. On the other hand, the pen changed my life, and I had almost no control over how things would turn out.

Up until I was fourteen I didn't like to read, and I didn't like to write. It was by accident that my brother bought a novel that I came to enjoy more than any game, or gift I'd ever been given. Books became the world I wanted to live in for a short amount of time.

It soon became clear to me that I never really wanted to live in someone else's make-believe world. I wanted my own. I wanted to create, to control. I wanted to make decisions for people's lives like they were my own children. I wanted to entertain others with my writing. I know this sounds insane, but I was only fourteen. It's alright to be a little crazy at that age. There was a problem with my dream, however. I could read a book. After all, we learn to read in school. It's practically law that we do so.

My problem was that I knew almost nothing about writing well. I didn't know what was so special about the stories my favorite authors would write. I just knew that I liked their writing. Even after I tried writing stories hundreds of pages long, it seemed a whole lot of "something" was missing from my work. What that "something" was, however, continued to elude me. My characters seemed like cookie cutter personalities. My plots seemed somehow off. Something wasn't exciting enough.

Something wasn't convincing enough...

It didn't help much when relatives read part of what I wrote, and then told me I was a good writer. At the time I thought they were right. At the time I thought surely I could publish these works, and make lots of money off of them. At the time, I was completely in the dark as to how much learning I really needed to do. There was something deep inside me that I tried to ignore. This something was the realist in me, telling me that I wasn't all that good yet.