My History with Writing

(AKA how I gave up on my dream and then un-gave up on my dream)

My magnum opus

Writing, for me, began with my older brother. He was (and still is) a very smart student, one of those ‘class-favourites’ but cool enough to not be the teacher’s pet. Practically everything he excelled at, I tended to fail—math, science, sports, making friends, etc. All except for one.

My brother struggled to read, and I was a freaking savant at it.

If you’re the younger sibling, you know how it feels to have even a bit of superiority over your sibling. He might have been good at everything else, but I had this. Reading and writing was, for most of elementary school, the one thing in school I was good at, and the thing I was most often rewarded for.

In fourth grade I got a green star sticker on one of my short stories I wrote for a class assignment. My teacher invited me to read it out in front of the class. Given I wasn’t a “share work at the front of the class” kind of kid… This meant everything to me. I wonder if she knows at all the impact that green sticker had on me. I still have that story, and I still have that sticker, and I still remember that teacher. Shout out to Ms. Kokesh!

This love followed me to middle school. I joined writing clubs and groups and was mentored in writing all throughout my youth and teenage years, and still use what I learned then in my writing now. Writing was also how I met one of my best friends. It’s how we bonded then and it’s how we still bond to this day, over a decade later.

But then I started to grow up. I entered that stage where childhood dreams need to become adulthood realities, and not all our dreams are totally realistic. I’m jealous of people who dream of lucrative careers. Like, naturally their passions take them towards dentistry or engineering or something. I really wish I had a passion for boring things (kidding) but unfortunately nothing else clicked for me.

In highschool a teacher asked us what our ‘spark in life’ was to help us figure out our career path. I did not say writing. I said film.

Film school was my compromise—my attempt to stop receiving the tepid response from my parents to my declaration of wanting to be a professional author while still doing something creative with my life. Believe me, when I started talking about directing or producing, I got a much better response. Imagine how they felt two years later.

Here’s a few things I learned about the industry in film school:

• You’ll work probably at least 12-hour days. This is if you’re a PA all the way up to the Director. No one escapes the long days, that’s just how much time making movies/shows/projects etc. take on the tight kind of deadlines they set to save money.

• Work will be unpredictable and unstable.

• You will have to work for free at the start of your career.

And if you’re passionate about movie making, these are all things you can live with. Because if you really think about it, novel writing is the exact same way. But I learned after about a year in school that I was definitely not as passionate about movie making as the rest of my classmates.

I think my dream of the film industry, while also a bit motivated by my lack of understanding of it, was in part a repression of what I truly wanted to do. What I truly wanted is a career that I loved, and all I’ve ever really loved was writing.

So I had one of those typical mid-university crises, panicked a little, called my mom a lot, and while I knew I didn’t want to go back to film school the next year—I really had no idea what I was going to do otherwise.

Then one night I was sitting in my room, sadly reading Maggie Stiefvater’s blog, and I ran across her article, “Writing the Book I Always Meant To.”

And in that moment, I decided to become an author.

A reading savant

Okay, important context. I first picked up a Stiefvater book when I was twelve years old. It was The Raven Boys, sitting in my middle school’s library. Now listen, I was not the kind of girl who cared about boys (queer), I wasn’t really like other girls (queer), and I definitely wasn’t going to be seen carrying around a book with boys on the cover and in the title (QUEER).

So I stole glances at it, made sure to scoff when other girls passed by so they knew I disapproved of all the boy-ness in this book, and set it down to never pick it up again.

Except I did pick it up again. I kept coming back like it was a secret friend I was keeping in my attic. I would wait for the library to be empty, sneak in, and then take it off the shelf and read the back cover and look at it for a little while. I started to hide it behind all the other books so that no one would check it out and I could keep visiting it.

To this day, I can’t explain the mystical draw I had to this book. If you believe in fate, you could say that there was some force that was making sure I picked it up. If that's true, then oh boy was it gonna win this fight.

One morning I got to school early, I unearthed The Raven Boys from the back of the shelf, and with a face as red as a cherry, I checked it out with our librarian at the desk. I immediately shoved it into my bag so no one saw. This book, and its series, would become one of my all time favourites—even to this day.

And this little moment when I was only 12 would ripple wider and wider until the moment that I’m 19 years old, panicking over my future and reading Stiefvater’s blog, and deciding that I can’t give up on my dream.

I called my parents the next day with all the stubbornness that had kept me from picking up The Raven Boys seven years ago, and declared that I was transferring to communications—mom, dad, I’m going to be a writer.

Now here I am, about four years-1.5 finished manuscripts-and a whole lot of experience later, and I haven’t regretted that decision for a second.