My Story

"There are some people that write 50k in a day, then there are the rest of us."

Drop and give me another 1k!

Participant

{{Childhood stories sound much more exciting when you look back and write them down, don't they?}}

Jessie Verve was sitting in a classroom, reading a book to a teacher. It was a picture book, with paragraph-long stories on each page. Not something hilarious, but a boring, bland book. The subjects were utterly forgettable. Jess started on another page, and in her head she thought, "this story should end like so...." but it did not. The climax was something mundane like Jim went to live in the city. "Well, I guess I'll just have to write it the way I wanted it when I'm a big kid."

At least a year passed, two. Apparently she was a big kid now. She owned a Writer's Digest Special magazine, though she didn't really read it because it was for boring adults. But that gave the aspiring author more validity, and she penned a book titled 'Kitty Queen Volumes I & II'. One-hundred-seven words, seven notebook pages, one illustration. The first story idea would have to wait, and is still waiting over eleven years later. But it's not gone, it didn't disappear.

However, I'm getting ahead of myself.

The whim was very vague, and didn't come back until the age of eight, when she turned to her mom and Barnes and Noble proclaiming, "There's nothing else to read! I'm just going to have to write my own story." There. The first verbal declaration. It was no longer a secret.

Stories were started, a children's publishing class taken. People grimaced at her stories. Not one work was ever finished, save a fan fiction for a famous detective. It wasn't encouraging at all. Without thinking it, she left crumpled-up scraps of her stories laying around the house. There was no use to keep track of them all. There was no need to write anything if it was going to be terrible and never be read and everyone was going to roll their eyes at her, saying "That isn't very good. You need to take out a bunch of those lines, they don't relate to the plot. If it's about a cat running a costume shop, don't talk about him being a DJ."

The end..... ?

Nope. There's a happy ending, at least to this aspiration.

Mom called Dad and Jess into the living room. "I found something amazing. I'm going to read it to you." She started reading from a small piece of paper. The story sounded intriguing and interesting. She got halfway through the paragraph and then Jess gasped.

"THAT'S MY STORY!"

Elation. Grinning. Happiness. It might... MIGHT just be worth it after all.

The years continued to pass. Jessie ditched all of those teachers and classmates to homeschool, and used all of her spare time to read and study fiction novels. She wrote short stories for her friends and dreamed up plots, maybe more plots than she needed. But that's okay. Because they're all right there with her first idea, filed away in her head.

Today she's almost finished with her first novel. It's a spy thiller with plenty of cute boys and bad guys and snooty teachers and skateboard stunt doubling. It's only a first draft, terrible. Random. Hilarious. Does that stop her now? Nope. Writing a novel is a long process, and hard, but as many great writers say long after they are a success "My first drafts are terrible. Not worth reading. I have to go through four drafts at least just to make it not embarrassing. You can't get to the fourth draft until you get to the first."