The Story Of How I Started Writing Stories...😎

_{Ketut Subiyanto}

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If you are someone that has been following my blog posts, then you probably know that I discovered my gift for writing at quite a young age. There was no big reveal or something major that happened in my life that led me to the discovery. The talent snuck up on me like the biblical thief in the middle of the night and by the time I realized, I was already doing something I would come to love dearly.

It was just one normal day, I tried my hand at something and I realized it was something I was quite good at. Don’t worry, I will tell you all about it.

I love watching movies now, but back then, when I was in primary school, all I had were books. Watching TV was very unpredictable due to the epileptic nature of our power holders, but books didn’t run on electricity and once you had it you could open them whenever you wanted.

Even from a young age, I was reading notable authors like J.K Rowling, Stephen King, Buchi Emecheta, and Chinua Achebe. This is just to name a few.

_{Tima Miroshnichenko}

It was when I was in JSS1 that I started trying my hand at creating my own fictional world. At first, I was doing comics. Well, I make a terrible artist. Back then, my best artworks were the ones I copied. I can draw perfectly when I have to copy it from somewhere else. But drawing straight from my head was always giving me a headache and it never really made sense to me.

Still, I was able to make a couple of comic books. And they were read only by my number one fan, that’s my younger sister. I gave up on that and just chose to write out the story and leave the drawing part, it was easier that way. The first story I wrote after the comic was actually a play, and it made loads of sense to me. And again, only my number one fan read it. It was the only play I would ever right to date, but unfortunately, I lost it one time when we were relocating.

I soon moved on to writing prose, and I realized that I liked this method best. The first book I wrote was actually an anthology, one of those books that always had “and other stories” as a suffix to the title.

All this while, I was only doing this because I felt like it. I was having great ideas in my head and I just needed to let it all out. Pouring everything out to the best of my ability. I was writing the stories with my pen and book, so there were a lot of typos then. Around this time, I was still pretty careless with my work. Losing the play had not taught me any lesson, but I soon lost this one as well.

_{Oleksandr Pidvalnyi}

I didn’t write much again after that. For a few years, I stayed celibate from writing. And then, while I was in SS1, one day I got the bright idea to start writing a diary. A few paragraphs in, I realized my life story then was too boring and I started adding spices and other things that had not happened. The next thing I knew, some of the people in my diary were beginning to develop superpowers. That was when I realized there was nothing about what I was writing that was a diary. I was writing a story.

I didn’t stop though, I kept at it. Pushing the story to see how far I would take it. It was the longest story I had written at that time, it filled up one long note and then more than half of a sixty-leaves notebook. When I was done, I realized only my sister couldn’t have a taste of this. Others had to read it.

Honestly, I can’t really remember how it got to that extent, but there was a girl in Arts Department that I ended up giving the story and she was the one that blew my mind away. Till tomorrow, I will always remember her reaction after she was done with the book and how she was gushing with how she had enjoyed it. She spoke to her friends about it and soon they were all begging me to borrow them. I did.

Passing from hand to hand took a toll on the book and soon it was in tatters, but I was happy. People other than my sister were now reading my books and they were actually enjoying it. The feeling was surreal.

_{Mikhail Nilov}

And that was when I told myself that this writing of a thing, I would take it as far as I possibly can. If this realization had happened while I was still in JSS3, I would have gone to Arts Department as well. But by then, I was already in Science and I was not even really interested in changing.

This book was also the first one I started being really careful with and I started handling them all with care. All the books I have written since my SS1 days are still intact. They might be a bit rough and torn due to the number of hands they had to pass through, but they are very complete and in order.

Some time ago I was going through my earliest stories and I could not help but smile. I had truly come a long way in writing. There were so many mistakes that were made back then, I wouldn’t even be able to make them now. Writing constantly has taught me a lot, and it is something I will continue to do.

As it is, I write on a daily basis. Be it fiction or non-fiction, I know I am writing daily. It has gotten to a stage where if I do not write for more than twenty-four hours, my fingers would begin to feel the itch because they are yet to do their routine dance on the keyboard.

And now, I have barely scratched the surface. There is still a lot out there that can be achieved, and I will surely work on getting there. And it is my fervent hope that I will be able to push myself to the highest point there is in this world of writing.

_{Andrea Piacquadio}

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_{Thank you for reading. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section below, I would love to know what you are thinking. Till we meet in the next post.}

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_{This post is inspired by the second topic of the week which is Talent Discovery. Feel free to take part.}

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_{Borderimage credit: @deimage.}