Three Cheers For Long Winded Stories No One Cares About!

My class got cancelled today and OF COURSE I was already at school, with no novel to read for fun or textbooks to read for ... not fun -- and I have a two hour wait! Blegh. So instead, I'm going to tell the story about me and writing. Kay?

I am in possession of the perfect childhood story that would be great if I became a writer. It's makes for an amazing "About the Author" blurb on the back of the book; I can actually see it in my mind. But with age, I have become more and more detatched and less confident in my writing abilities, so maybe it will just be the story I tell people instead of being presented on the back cover under a nonchalant-but-obviously-posed picture of my face.

So here it goes:

I was the kid who wrote and wrote and wrote -- and when she wasn't writing "great stories" she was reading great stories. I was writing stories before I could write and my mother still has the pages of swiggly lines or made up letters (my father called them my hieroglyphic writing-I twisted 5s and Js around so they were unrecognizable) to prove it. After finishing a "story" I would hold the pages in front of me as if they weren't all jibberish and "read" them to whichever parent or family member would listen. The same pages could produce a story about a princess followed by a story about an ant, it didn't matter. Stories were pouring out of my ears and I was making stuff up as I went. I was writing before I could write.

At the tender age of ten, I announced to my family that I had my life plan all ready and that I would "Teach elementary school during the school year and write best selling novels during the summer." Yes, that is correct: "best selling novels", oh my, I was a modest child.

As soon as I could write, the writing of stories continued full force. I would get those writing notebooks from school and fill pages and pages of stories, often incredibly complicated ones. Most of them are cheesy and predictable, but they are so much fun to go back and reread, because they take me back. I can remember myself agonizing over word choice and what to name my characters, and they were most often named after people in my life at the time. Often I would consult a thesaurus and as a result the page would be littered with big, complicated words that I sometimes don't understand now.

It was in grade 4 & 5 that the best teacher in the world heard about my dream to be a writer, and she was super supportive. She would read my stories and help with the grammar and spelling and leave page-long notes on the last page addressing any plot holes or character questions-- in short she was amazing. My elementary school was K-5, so when I "graduated" from grade 5 and she gave everyone a little grab bag with notes to each individual student, and in mine it said "When your first book gets published, I'll be there to buy one on the first day. Thanks for a great two years and good luck with your writing, you can do it."

After that, it all went downhill. I went into grade 6 & 7 with excitement, but really got very little support on writing, and in these years became more busy, still writing stories but with less ferocious vigor.

In high school, I got little to no recognition and it was suddenly "uncool" to be so excited about "school stuff", not that this completely deterred me, but I wouldn't annouce the story I was writing about and the glowing notes on my essays and written work became much less frequent. Other kids were chosen for writing seminars and I was thrown so deeply into the world of organized sport and extracirriculars that I barely had time to churn out stories on a regular basis. My high school had a school newspaper for about 6 months, in which I wrote a few articles, but it was so disorganized, that in the 6 months it was running, only 4 issues came out. This is not to say that some teachers didn't support my writing, it was just more hit and miss, my literature teacher liked my writing, but my English 12 teacher hated it.

I do have one from high school, a little (and by little I mean 45 pages on MS Word in 12point font) story I wrote about cloning and espionage, but the old homage "write what you know" really really really applies there, and when I read it, I can't decide if it's complete and utter crap or actually kind of good. In the two years I've been in college, I have written countless essays, but no stories -- and this blog has been the jumping off point to get back into the creative writing pool. I honestly have no idea if I'm a good writer or not, but my regularly good english marks do suggest that I'm not horrible at it and I think that if I use this as an outlet, I could maybe get the juices flowing again. I'm also thinking of taking a creative writing class in the fall, and maybe determine if I have talent (and if I enjoy it) once and for all.

I still would love to become a writer, if not for the fact that I enjoy writing, but maybe just because I have a great About the Author blurb all ready for me. Something like that can't just go to waste, can it?