A History of Writing: Teenage Escapades and Beginnings
I was thirteen when I first started writing creatively. If you've met me, you probably are aware that I am a shy and withdrawn--it's usually the first thing people notice about me. I'm fine with not being loud and outspoken if it means I can be a ~creative butterfly~
this usually meant i wasn't picked for sports or friendships but i'm fine, okay?
My introversion meant it was difficult for me to make friends--I had a handful of close friends, which was awesome, but do you know many kids who don't want more friendships? Every kid wants to be popular, even if it's just for five minutes.
Internet forums were just blossoming in the early 2000's when I was a teenager--I loved to read, and I also wanted to write my own stories. Back then, I wanted to work with video games--I didn't know if I wanted to design them, program them, or write the script for them. I just knew I enjoyed playing them and wanted to be a part of the process somehow.
I also enjoyed watching television--being introverted, it seemed like the characters on television were saying everything that I never had the chance to do.
My first foray into writing creatively was as part of a "Sonic the Hedgehog" role playing forum--before you judge me, I was thirteen and Sonic Adventure 2 had come out not too long ago on the Sega Dreamcast, and I was a BIG fan.
Now, as a thirteen year old, I had unfortunately been failed by the Texas public educational school system--not failed in the sense of "I didn't pass my classes," but failed in the sense of "they didn't teach me what I needed to know," that distinction is important. I had no concept of what good grammar was, or even how to form it. A sample sentence of my work would have been filled with misspellings, capital letters in the wrong place. Quotation marks used sparingly, and transposed with apostrophe's and commas. I could put ideas to paper well enough, but those ideas didn't look good.
Some wonderful people not much older than me were able to teach me the necessities of grammar during my time on that forum, and I guess the Texas educational school system started carrying their weight eventually (even though my high school's Creative Writing teacher told me I was "not cut out" to take his course in high school...I'm not bitter).
i swear im not bitter
What I'm trying to say is everyone is really bad when they first start trying to do something. And if someone is, they're either lying to you or not human, because it's our very nature to have to practice to become better at things.
My parents always wanted me to be "the best," my mother always bragged around town about how I had all A's throughout high school, and about my class rank in my high school, and all this other shit that ten years later doesn't amount to all that much. I get it, parents WANT to be proud of their children, but it put a lot of pressure on me that I wasn't always able to live up to--in more ways than one.
Now that I'm an adult, I've really had to struggle with not being "the best." This last year, I was not published in my school's literary journal, but several of my friends were. I was bitter about not being published, for a while actually.
But it's not the end of my life, and being published in that journal won't make my career for me. I have to keep trying at it and keep working towards something, and if I let one, or five, or a hundred rejections stop me, then I've failed. But not before.
In video game culture, players have a nasty habit of telling other players to "git gud"--that's 'get good' for those not in the know--when they are playing poorly.
There are always going to be people who criticize what you're doing and how you're doing it. In our modern day of Internet culture, those criticisms are more harsh and uglier than criticisms in past eras because they come from behind the illusion of anonymity. There are heterosexual people who tell me my stories revolving around gay people aren't true to the "gay experience."
Prove them wrong. Start. Begin. Try something new, because if you never start, you'll never know if you'll succeed or not. You may try and fail, but the real failure, and this is a cliche, is to never have tried at all.
So why not begin? Everyone has embarassing stories of how they started, and someday, maybe yours will be a humorous story to share on a blog, or in a book, or in a television interview. You'll never know.
