Over the years writing has become more and more part of my life, but years back when I started my career paths, I was on completely different plans. I wasn’t one of those kids who was obsessed with learning to write at a young age, in fact I needed hooked on phonics when I was younger to even get to a point that I could read on my own. The process was long, but eventually I absorbed books regularly because I could read them and went on to tutor other kids my age in reading. But at that time, I didn’t think I was good enough to write. This was back when the internet was still just being born to a level that people used it regularly.
When I was twelve I took a summer college creative writing class that they offered kids my age. And that was my first real exposure to writing. I even have the first thing I ever wrote. It’s pretty awful, but I keep it around just to see how much my writing has evolved over the years. I even posted it on here. That first exposure was what made me realize that I could write things that people might want to read. Unfortunately it wouldn’t be for another few years that I would take an actual college creative writing class that had me delving into just what it meant to be a writer and to see if I truly had what it takes.
Back then I had little discipline in myself, which when you aren’t disciplining yourself it can make it incredibly difficult to just sit down and write. I had a thousand different ideas to write with, but I just couldn’t get the words out on the paper. It was a challenge for me at first. I just couldn’t do it. And I gave up for a few years. I’d occasionally go back when inspiration hit me to write something, but for the most part I devolved into the online roleplaying forum scene. It’s from that world, of creating a character and then building story lines that I first realized I did have a way of writing that I could follow.
You see, every writer handles things differently. Some are all about the plot in their book, others the premise, some like to keep balanced. But me… I was all about the characters. I wrote my stories to find out what kind of ridiculous situations the characters would get into, and to discover more about them. They became the important thing to me, and eventually when I was 20 I developed one character who encompassed my voice. At first she was called Jocelyn, and she is still called that today on possibly the only roleplaying forum I still keep up with. But I changed her name to Gnidori when I started writing my first legitimate novel.
The process started slow. I wrote two chapters over the course of multiple months. The first chapter I wrote, I had someone read along with two other pieces I had written. They picked that one out of all the others and said this was a brilliant piece and I needed to write more about that character. So I went with it and wrote more. It was after I finished the second chapter that I found myself in mental hospitals. There I proceeded to complete thirteen more chapters over the three months I spent locked up. I knew I wanted to see more and more of Gnidori and her life unfold.
By the time I was out of mental hospitals I had written around half a book. I kept it with me everywhere, but I didn’t write more. I went through periods of just trying to survive and live. Changing homes at least four different times until eventually I found myself in a second living home. They are the kinds of places you go when you would otherwise be sleeping on the street. It was there I found the stability to finish my novel. I wrote the second half of the book, over 50,000 words in under two weeks then proceeded to edit and publish the book all while still living in that second living home.
As much as I admit today that if I had known ahead of time I would have started with a one-off novel rather than a series, I still see The Real Folktale Blues as the book I wrote through so many struggles in my life. Much of it came from a place and time when I myself was ‘blue’ and you can see that depression leaked through in the pages. But if anything helped me to get back on my feet it was the writing of that book. It did more for me than hundreds of hours or therapy and numerous people telling me to grow up and stop being lazy.
Since then, I’ve been writing short stories and little pieces here and there, until finally I realized… Hey I need to write a novel again, because I become HAPPY when I do. And then I realized… when did my happiness depend on how much I wrote each day?
That’s what being a writer is for me. I’m a writer because I’m a better and happier person when I write. So why would I not do this?
