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 the last part, I was talking about how I stopped writing When Fire and Water Collide because I had no idea where it was going and was losing interest in the story. A year went by (once again), and that's where I'll pick up here.
As you can probably guess, I hadn't done any writing in that year, though I thought about it a lot.
In June, 2017 the new Wonder Woman movie came out. I wasn’t allowed to watch it at the time it came out because of the nude scene, but my older brother watched it and loved it. He came home telling me all about it and showing me the trailer and different clips. Well, as I was watching the trailer and clips from the movie, a picture started to form in my mind. I thought it was so cool how the Amazon women lived on this island that was camouflaged from the world. I took elements from that island in the movie and added my own to create Zora, and then I started imagining this girl and two guys flying over a stormy ocean on these Unicorn like creatures. And that picture of them flying towards Zora kept entering my mind, day and night, for weeks, until finally on August first I decided to sit down and get all of these ideas that were in my head onto paper before I forgot them, making the basis for Saving Zora.
I actually wrote the first two chapters just on a regular school notebook, scribbling out the words as they flowed from me. I hadn't felt that free and good about writing in a long, long time, and it felt right. As I wrote, my hand cramping so bad I wanted to cry, more and more ideas, names, and thoughts came to me, forming the most basic of shapes for my story. As I've said before, I'm a pantser, I don't plot, so while I had the general idea, I didn't know most of the things that'd happen until I actually got there.
As I was figuring out some things, I knew that I wanted to have a character death in my book, because those are great to bring emotion and drive the characters, so I went through the list of characters I had so far until I found the perfect one to kill later on.
After a couple of weeks and writing those two chapters on paper, I knew I couldn't continue like that, so I moved to my dad's iPad. I typed up what I had so far on the screen keyboard and made that where I write. Interesting fact, I actually didn't stop writing on the iPad until April 2020, when I'd finished writing Saving Zora.
But anyway, during that week of moving to the iPad, I started a creative writing class by a fellow homeschool mom. We have this thing where different moms and dads will teach classes at this church, like math, speech, chemistry, essay writing, etc. Since it was creative writing, few people joined. It was actually just three people: me, a girl, and a boy. There was technically one other boy, but he quit not too far into it. I absolutely loved that class! I learned so much, and really grew as a writer because of it. Beforehand, I still knew so little about writing, didn't know all of the terms, and didn't even know that we judge size by word count, not page. It was a little rocky at times as the other two students would talk about all of these things and I'd have no clue what they were talking about. But let me tell you, if it wasn't for that class and the amazing teacher I had, Saving Zora probably would've ended up like all of my other stories: abandoned and forgotten, never to be written. I highly doubt I would've finished it, and even if I had, it would've been trash like my other ones.
By the end of that writing class we were supposed to have written a short story, but, my poor teacher, all of her students were overzealous and asked her if they could write full length novels instead, and just turn in a section of it for the short story. The boy did part one in his book, the girl actually wrote the whole thing but it was a novella (and is now a full length book), and I did the first 6 chapters as my "short story".
After the class ended, I wrote off and on for the next two-and-a-half years or so, writing every day and then taking a three month break, writing a lot and then only writing a sentence a week. It was slow going and I lost interest a lot, but unlike all of my other failed projects, I kept coming back to this one. Why? Because now was the right time. I knew a lot about writing, I'd grown in my skill, I had a story I actually really loved, and I was pursuing writing seriously as a career. I wanted to be an author. I wanted this to be my job. So I kept at it until I finished Saving Zora in April 2020.
After I finished writing it, I took a two week break and worked on a different WIP. I think I actually wrote like 20,000 words that month, which is crazy for me. Then I got to editing! I didn't know too much about editing starting out, but learned as I went. Since April 2020 to now, February 2021, I have been editing, revising, sending it off to beta readers, editing with their feedback, editing, another round of beta readers, oh and editing. My story has come a long way from starting out writing on a notebook to now, and I love it so much!! I'm so, so excited about it, and while it has some more work needing to be done, I'm hoping to publish it this summer!
And that's the conclusion to the My Writing Journey So Far series! Thank you so much for taking the time to read this, and I hope you enjoyed it! Maybe it's inspired you, or maybe it's made you feel good about your own journey because it's so much better and smoother than mine. XP Whatever the case, I loved sharing this with you and remembering how far I've come! If you have any questions or have something you want to say, please leave a comment or send me a message! I'd love to hear from you.
–– Katie Marie
Comments