Everyone has to start somewhere. Right??
I started writing when I was probably 12 or 13 in random spiral notebooks. I thought I was going to be the next SE Hinton. You can obviously guess how that turned out for me. This is for several reasons, though. One, I never thought my books were long enough and in the early 90s, I didn't know what a novella was! Granted, these are handwritten; typed we may be looking at long short stories. Two, I didn't think they were good enough. And, three, I had absolutely no idea I mean zero idea what to do. I mean, the internet wasn't around back then and a cell phone was unheard of. So these notebooks have just traveled around the country with me as I went to college, got married, moved back and forth from the East Coast to the West Coast... twice. And, now, I don't think I will ever do anything with them. They have become more symbolic than anything else.
In college, I majored in journalism and mass communications where I developed and refined my ability to write. I'm still not the best public speaker in the world, but I love to write. As I have developed my voice, those original stories don't even reflect anything I would write now. I see them as the immature writings of a kid, which they were. Every now and then I will flip through them, and remember how proud and excited I was when I was writing them. Some are finished stories, some are incomplete. So, my best friend at the time edited and left comments which are hilarious to read now. She was the best motivational, supportive person. It could have been the worst thing ever created, and she would have been like, "this will win a Pulitzer!" I love her for that!
I can see the massive influence of the books I was reading at the time like Sweet Valley High and Christopher Pike in the stories I wrote. Looking at it now, I was very much very pigeonholed in the style and genre. I wrote about things I was interested in and focused on how to adapt my own environment into the stories. Not a horrible habit, but it just wasn't very refined at the time.
However, my apparent obsession with description is a little overwhelming. I'm talking massive descriptions of everything. How the main character decorated her bedroom, every single outfit and accessory she and her friends wore each day. The weather. Everything! It was literally a snapshot of the inside of my 12 year old mind. Thankfully, as I got a little older and into high school, my writing started to develop a little more substance, but still nothing that I would ever see flying off the shelves at Barnes and Noble!
Now looking at these notebooks while taking the pictures to put here, there are a few ideas that I might be willing to revisit in the future. There are a few decent plot ideas. But look how old these are. The printed pages are the continual feed paper! You know the kind with the side edging that you have to tear off? Wow, there's your trip back to the early 90s!
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If you are really bored you can read about some of my personal adventures in life raising two teenagers and loving a husband who is fighting Chronic Myeloid Leukemia and all the lesson I learn along the way. Educate This.