I have many plans and goals in my life; aspirations that one day I hope to achieve and complete. As I have aged, these goals and dreams have changed with me, but the one thing that has always remained constant is writing. In elementary school, I wanted to be a fashion designer and an acclaimed writer. Now I want nothing to do with fashion, but I still want to be a well-known author.
Perhaps my #1 goal in life is to write something that changes somebody’s, anybody’s, life for the better. This goal also stems my motivation to write for myself. I love writing, to me- it’s the purest form of self-reflection and I would only be able to create something so profound that it changes someone’s outlook on life if I cared and loved it enough to do so.
This realization came to me when I first read the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling when I was in the first grade. Now, I enjoyed books from a very young age, but it wasn’t until I read the Harry Potter series that I realized that books can have an effect on so many people, worldwide. My young brain thought well that’s magic- creating whole new worlds and characters people love by just putting a few words on a page. Mind-blowing that was, and, I found, that I wanted so much to do the same.
I started off big. Whole new worlds, all-powerful beings, magical powers, talking animals- the whole shebang. I wanted to get as far away from reality as I possibly could, because writing was my escape from reality. My dreams and thoughts cascading from my head onto a piece of paper in jumbled form.
High school helped me to even more expand my writing skills, by introducing me to works that really challenged me to up my game.
Freshman year, we had to read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, and I discovered that auto-biographies could be as compelling, or even more so, as stories about aliens or were-wolves. I became fascinated by people’s life stories. I wanted to know their individual truths, so I joined the school newspaper as an outlet for doing so. Junior year, for AP Lang, we read essays and speeches from brilliant minds such as Martin Luther King, Eleanor Roosevelt, Amy Tang, Malcolm X, and John F. Kennedy. We learned how you can influence crowds of people with the right words such as Obama did in his speeches for the 2008 election. Senior year in AP Lit. we read books and plays like the Kite Runner, the novel that taught me the importance of character development and redemption in a story, The Portrait of Dorian Gray, the novel that solidified my interest for classical stories and Oscar Wilde, and Things Fall Apart, the first novel I ever read by an African author. These materials were different genres and different forms in the way you can tell a story, but they were all good, in their own right. I learned there in high school, that I shouldn’t limit myself to only fantasy fiction and that you don’t have to write a full-pledge, traditional novel to craft a story that touches people universally.
For me, writing is having thousands of ideas shoot through my head daily and I have catch some of them before they can speed out. The easy part is coming up with and getting an idea the hard part is writing it down, dissecting it, and making it articulate. When I finally catch the idea, I start my writing with the characters of the story. I interview them in my head and on paper: what are their favorite colors, sayings, places? What do they do in their free time? What are their motivations, weaknesses, and strengths? Who are they? Sometimes I put my characters in random situations, different worlds from the one in their story just so I can get a sense of how they’d react. One of the most important things to do when I’m writing and one of my favorite things to look for when I’m reading is a character’s development. If the plot doesn’t develop the character I know I’m doing something wrong and I go back to the drawing board.
That being said, know that writing isn’t easy, and whoever tells you otherwise is straight-up lying. Writing may never be easy, but I do it anyway, because to not would be even harder.
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