I've talked some about how I started writing on my Instagram account, but I want to go in depth here! I feel like my writing journey can be broken into three segments, each having a distinct feel to it, so there'll be three parts to this. I hope you enjoy!
In My Writing Journey So Far (Part 1), we left off with that a year had passed after finishing my first "book", Just Trust in God, and I hadn't written anything more. I was burntout and didn't really care to write anymore.
But then my mom bought me this book called One Year Adventure Novel by Daniel Schwabauer, which essentially walks you through the steps of coming up with and writing a novel in one year. That's great and all, and definitely taught me more about writing than my 11-12 self knew, but the problem I was having with it was that it was having me plot out my story. I didn't know this at the time, but I'm actually a pantser, plotting doesn't work for me, plus I didn't know how to plot. I was basically writing the actual book, just leaving out a few minor details like if she had a pet or not. I didn't–and still don't really–know how to plot. And because of that it was really bogging me down and I felt no motivation. I thought I was going to have to write the entire book twice, and I've never been good at planning things out like that. I don't know what's happening or what my characters are going to be like further in the book until I get there. Needless to say, I didn't stick with that book or that story idea for long.
Fast forward a year-and-a-half, I was 13 and again, hadn't written anything in the time that'd passed. I'd pretty much forgotten all about writing. But then I was reading The Michael Vey series by Richard Paul Evans (Such an amazing series by the way, you should definitely check it out!), and really liked the concept of the characters having electric powers.
And that got me thinking, what if I wrote a story about people who had elemental powers? Ideas flooded me, and I got really excited about writing for in first time in a long time. I made a Pinterest board for it, wrote down my ideas in a notebook, and then started writing. After some back-and-forth, I decided the title would be When Fire and Water Collide. In WFaWC, some babies would be born with a star tattoo on their wrist, which meant they had a power; water, fire, electricity, earth, etc. It was about Cora, a 16-year-old girl who was born with silver eyes, which signified that she had all of the powers. No one else was like that, and it was prophesied that she'd save the world, yada yada yada. You know how it goes. XP
I was so motivated to write it and was writing constantly. It helped that my friend was also into writing, and so every time we'd finished a chapter we'd email it to each other. (Oh, the days where I didn't really know about editing and loved my WIP for what it was)
Here's a picture of the first two pages of When Fire and Water Collide, so you can see how I grew in the time that'd passed since I was ten and how far I still had to grow:
After writing a good chunk, I decided I wanted more than one POV (Point of View), and so added the love interest's. But I was writing in first-person, and at the time didn't know there was a way to do more than one POV in first, so not only did I have to go back and add several scenes, but I had to change it from first-person to third-person. Once I got that done, I moved on, but my writing was getting slower and slower, and I was getting burntout again. Since I'm a pantser, I didn't know where I was taking the story and had just been putting random crap in, so by the time I got to where I left off at 159 pages and 29,300 words, I literally had no idea what to do next. Eventually, I just gave up and stopped, having lost interest in the story.
I believe it was best for me to stop when I did, because although I still like the story idea and might one day go back and rewrite it, I really didn't know what I was doing and still didn't know so much about writing. A year went by (once again), and that's where I'll pick up on the third and final part of My Writing Journey So Far!
I hope you're enjoying this as much as I'm enjoying remembering my journey, and know that no matter how bad your past or current writing is, you'll always get better, always improve. So keep writing, no matter what!
–– Katie Marie
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