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.

It wasn't until I read my own stuff over and over again that I truly realized my work needed to be deeper. I knew I had to expand my world. I had to expand my characters, and ideas. I just didn't know how to accomplish this. Eventually I left writing fiction behind. I didn't read near so much anymore. I found a new love.

Music.

Every day I used my computer to write and record songs. Now it took a lot of time to develop any talent in this, but I had family members to practice with. That made it more fun. Accomplishments were more celebrated. Even small accomplishments made it seem as though I was really getting somewhere because the other people involved with my music made me grow faster. The strange thing is I was still writing! Writing music wasn't like fiction, but it was a new experience, and a fresh mode of thought for me.

Eventually I went back to writing fiction while I did my music. I tried to connect the two somehow, so that my music could mirror my fiction. I developed interesting songs that way, and interesting fiction. I found my stories getting deeper every time I rewrote them. After researching certain writers, I found that some stories took ten years to develop before a word is ever published.

I wasn't about to spend that much time writing a book. I wanted to be a published writer long before I was thirty. But realistically my skill didn't grow that fast. I hadn't had enough life experiences to know how a world should really work. I hadn't had enough experiences with people to be able to decide how to develop a believable character.

I'm not quite thirty yet, but I still haven't published a word of fiction. My writing has finally reached the point of realism, and it is coming along better than ever. I think having more experiences in life has helped me. I also never lost interest in writing. That helped just as much. I'm confident that I can now help others, with less experience, to write to their own hearts content.

I believe I now write fiction at a professional level, and am hard at work on the first in my series of novels. This article, however, is the first in a series I intend to do on instructional writing. Stay tuned in for the continuation of the "Writing 101" instructional series. Each installment will stand alone as a useful source for beginning writers.