How I Came to Write a Book
Long before I learned how to write a proper academic essay, my world was built out of smudged pencil writings in my notebooks, world building like my brother does with his D&D games as a Dungeon Master, and the quiet thrill of a really good book.
This article is somewhat related to mine, as it also discusses literacy and how it’s declining because younger people are, for lack of a better word, being thrown into the deep end on reading or writing. Having good literacy is needed to be able to write in any type of fashion. Without having that, authors would be out of a job and I wouldn’t have decided to start writing a book. Now, let’s get into why I’ve decided to write a book!
Like a lot of people who fell in love with books, I didn’t get into writing through a classroom. I got into it because I was surrounded by people who would write all the time, one person who really stuck with me was my mom. She would write little notes to me, something positive to get me through my day, and then when I was old enough, she showed me her first book she ever wrote. When I started getting into writing, she was my biggest inspiration and during COVID, since I couldn’t leave my house, I started writing small stories. They didn’t really mean anything, honestly, it was just some harmless fun.
Then came freshman year of high school. I got bored one day in class and started thinking about a story I could write. I didn’t do anything about it at the time but eventually it kept festering until it was all I could think about. Because of that, I finally wrote it down in my Notes app, I wasn’t anything special, just a prologue, but it felt as if something needed to get out. After I had written it, I didn’t continue writing for a long time; School, extracurriculars, family, and life were my main concerns, not writing something that I didn’t believe I could accomplish.
Finally, around the end of sophomore year, I looked back at the prologue that I had written and decided to show it to my mom. During all of this, she was getting her degree in English so she could become an author. I figured she was the best person to come to for help. While she didn’t give me many corrections, the biggest one she gave me was that I didn’t sound like I had any love for my writing. Loving to write had inspired me into writing in the first place, and losing that made it difficult to want to write. That was the price I paid since I was so caught up in everything else in my life. After I talked with my mom I decided to re-work the prologue I’d written and then I continued writing after that. I wrote half a chapter, and then I decided to give the characters names instead of just “Character A” or “Character B,” and I made a character analysis for them as well so that it felt more like something I was creating instead of a fantasy.
Because I kept writing and pushed through writer’s block, I’ve made a world that I can call my own and I have, for lack of a better word, a narration of something that I want to share with the world. My early, stubborn love of reading (the kind that keeps you turning pages by flashlight long after you should be asleep) naturally spilled over onto the blank page, turning me into someone who visited other author’s worlds into someone who is trying to build her own. Even now, I’m still writing more chapters and keep building the world that I’ve had in my head for years now.