My History | My Path as a Writer
Introduction
Today, I want to talk about my writing history. I’ve been writing for several years and I never had a good example of what a writer’s path should look like. It was hard to tell if I was doing everything the right way, though there isn’t really a correct way to go about becoming a writer. This isn’t going to be a post giving advice on becoming a writer or suggestions for how to develop your skills--I’ll release something like that in the future. Instead, I’m just going to talk about the things I did historically as I learned to write and found my voice.
There is a video version of this post available on my YouTube channel. You can check it out here:
Composition Books and Stapled Papers
I don’t remember exactly what my first book was, but I remember that my early stories were all written in either composition books or on booklets that were 8x11 paper sheets stapled together. I would draw pictures in all my books, too. In those days, between the ages of about five and nine, I wrote stories about myself and my friends, usually in some sort of twisted version of our own reality. The tales often got me in trouble at school, since they tended to make a mockery of my classmates or paint them in a bad light. At one point in third grade, I was even told I wasn't allowed to enter a writing competition because my teacher believed that I would write stories that were about my classmates. I have no ill feelings toward her, she was probably correct. That's what I liked to write and I didn't like most of my classmates. They didn't like me, either.
My main series was something I called Heroes of the Playground. I don’t think I have any of those left, for better or for worse. These stories were about my friends and me at school, generally protecting it from demons and monsters. I can’t recall very many specifics; I think at one point one of the classmates we didn’t like turned out to be a monster in disguise and he transformed into a multi-headed dragon. Another story I recall had an enormous demon with a tornado for legs tearing up the school. They were all creative, but I’m sure the writing quality was poor at best.
What’s most important about this stage is that I wrote a lot and I filled composition book after composition book with my stories. Each one had roughly two hundred pages (in a kid’s handwriting) of stories. I had chapters, I numbered my pages, and I hand-wrote every single part of the books.
Video Game Novelization
Around the age of ten and through to about twelve, I stopped focusing on original stories and started something new. I’m impressed that I decided to do this on a whim at that age because it was a smart move that definitely helped me out as I developed my skills. I decided to start writing novel versions of games that I liked. I knew I wasn’t going to publish them, so my goals here were growth and education. I'm glad that I had the foresight to do this then, because the multi-year exercise drastically improved my writing skills and forced me to think outside the box in terms of writing methodology, rather than remaining stuck in the same rut and repeating the same mistakes.
I wrote novelizations for a few games, but I don’t remember all of them. I know that I did Windwaker and Sacred Stones because those were several notebooks absolutely filled with stories. Windwaker especially was a challenge because the main character in that game doesn’t even talk… it’s a Zelda game. Sacred Stones was also a challenge because the combat in strategy games like that is remarkably simple, but stories need grand, expansive battles. I wrote a lot of fight scenes and had to figure out how to make them seem new and fresh each time. Novelizing both of these games, among others that I did, absolutely helped me to hone some crucial writing skills.
The Overlord Saga
At about the age of fourteen, I started writing a series I’d been dreaming of for a long time called The Overlord Saga. It was a bit of a hidden world fantasy in which certain people who are believed to have evil tendencies are drafted into an Illuminati-esque, international organization called the Shadow Alliance. The main character accidentally killed someone and so was drafted into the organization under the belief that he’d done it on purpose. He decided to play along in order to survive and, over time, started leaning into his rule as an evil apprentice more and more.
It took me several years to write the first one and in the end, I wrote about six of my planned nine or so books. I don’t recall the exact tally for everything I’d written in The Overlord Saga, but the word count wasn’t too far from a million. Yet, when I was finished with the fifth book, I went back and started reading the first one only to find that I hated it. I had grown so much as a writer over the course of the series that the entire foundation for my series was disgusting and useless to me. I scrapped all of it.
Elegance and Slaughter
Realizing that I hated the series I’d been writing for several years was rough, but I didn’t give up entirely. I wrote a novel called Elegance and Slaughter that was intended to be the origin story of one of the characters in The Overlord Saga. It was a murder mystery and it had far more nuance and skill within its pages than could have been found anywhere in the original series. That isn’t to say Elegance and Slaughter was a great book--it decidedly wasn’t--but I am saying that it was a notable improvement.
Elegance and Slaughter is the first story I used to query agents. When I got several agents asking for more chapters or an entire manuscript, I was so excited. I thought I’d made it. Everyone who read the chapters I sent, though, told me that I still needed to improve and to query them again in the future. Still, this was the first sign I was getting close and that my dream could come true. I could write.
Edwin
I wrote another prequel story for The Overlord Saga. This time, it was a short story for an international writing competition called Writers of the Future. My short story, entitled Edwin, focused on a man who worked for the Overlords in their R&D division. The titular character, Edwin, had been coerced into doing so with the promise that he’d be permitted to use the organization’s resources to research a cure for his wife’s debilitating disease. This story was extremely raw and emotional, with Edwin struggling with his work all while taking care of his wife and infant daughter. It wasn’t about the overlords at all, they were just setting. This was purely about Edwin.
The book has some issues, for sure--some of my common mistakes are certainly present in it. Yet, when I submitted it to a contest that receives tens of thousands of entries each quarter, I received an honorable mention. I couldn’t believe it. I remember sitting on the train when I got an email from the contest coordinator notifying me that I was receiving an award for my short story. My first thought was that I just wasn’t understanding the email, so I read it again and again, trying to figure out if I was misunderstanding it. But I wasn’t.
Receiving that honorable mention turned out to be the kick in the pants I needed to sit down and really focus on something new, fresh, and unique… enter my first published novel.
How I Ruined My Life
I wrote How I Ruined My Life several years ago. It received generally positive reviews from its readers and all in all, it’s a book that is technically written well. I’ve been told it’s easy to read, meaningful, and even impactful, which is all I ever really wanted from a book. I think that the story exemplifies where I was at the time of the book’s writing not only as a writer but as a person. I clearly still had things I was wrestling with and trying to figure out in my own life, which translated onto the page.
I’m going to talk about How I Ruined My Life in greater detail in a future post. For now, I’ll just say this: How I Ruined My Life represents someone I used to be and views I once held, but no longer reflects me as either a person or as a writer. There are aspects of the story I did not execute properly. For one, it isn’t clear in the book that the viewpoint character is meant to be a terrible person that you don’t like. This is at the core of any negative feedback I’ve gotten: people don’t like the book because they don’t like the main character, and I failed to make it clear that this was intentional in the book.
Ultimately, I find How I Ruined My Life to be a great reflection of my prior writing skills, but a poor reflection of who I was and certainly who I am. I think it’s an easy read ultimately not the worst thing I’ve written, but it has some serious problems that need to be addressed, which I hope to do in the future.
Imperfect
After How I Ruined My Life, I started working on a series called Imperfect. I initially wrote four books in the series, each about two hundred thousand words in length. Then I scrapped those and started again. Then I scrapped that and started again. I just couldn’t figure out how to approach the story that I wanted to tell. Truthfully, this is something that I am still actively working on, but it’s on the backburner at the moment. Imperfect is going to be a huge undertaking and I need to really put a ton of time, thought, and heart into it for my vision to be realized.
In the midst of writing How I Ruined My Life, I decided to write a serialized prequel to the story, hoping this would help ground me in a setting for the world. This prequel was published on Wattpad and was entitled The Imperfect’s Journal. I think I did pretty well for something I was writing once a day in short bursts, but I wouldn’t consider it canon in the Imperfect universe, anymore.
The Ansleigh Arc
A little over two years ago, I wrote another short story called The Ansleigh Arc, intending to enter it into the same contest I had entered Edwin into. This was mainly to see if I could still write because I hadn’t really written anything in a while due to a slump I was going through at the time. The Ansleigh Arc was a science fiction story about the end of human civilization, which is in a spacecraft floating toward a sun. The main character uses entertainment technology on the ship to navigate the memories of people who had the privilege of living on earth before it was destroyed; the technology allows him to experience the love story of a young man and a woman he meets named Ansleigh.
I am still fond of this story and feel it’s the most self-contained short story I’ve ever written. It isn’t set in some grand universe I’ve been working on for years, it was just a short story told in a simple science-fiction universe with basic technology that served a single purpose. It was simple and it worked. In fact, it worked well enough that I received another award, and this time I actually went to the award ceremony in Los Angeles, which was a great experience. I then published this short story on Kindle earlier this year!
Today
I haven’t written much since The Ansleigh Arc save another short story, which I intend to talk more about later this year and will hopefully be publishing shortly thereafter. I’m also actively working on a series of novels that will replace How I Ruined My Life once they’re completed, tentatively entitled Keeping Secrets from Friends. However, beyond that, I’ve been writing a lot of tabletop roleplaying sessions for my friends, several blog posts, and more. I am seeking to actively write as much as I can so that I can maintain momentum and not descend into yet another slump. So far so good!
Conclusion
So there you have it, from age five to age twenty-seven, this has been a look into my path as a writer. It wound up being a bit longer and more in-depth than I had originally set out for, so I hope it wasn’t too long or dull for you! Thanks very much for sticking around if you made it this far. If my story inspired you to share your own, I’d love to hear it! It doesn’t just have to be writing, either. If you’re a creator of any kind, please consider sharing your story! I’d love to see how the journeys of others are different from or similar to my own path.
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Thanks again and, until next time, bye!