Day Three - Talking about my writing has never been easy...

For those who are actually reading this blog, I feel a bit of pity. This is probably the most boring blog in existence! After all, I have absolutely no idea how to talk about my writing. Sure, I could write an entry today saying, "I wrote for X minutes and worked on X story," but I find that approach pretty boring. Writing is an art form, not something to be summed up analytically.

I came to a realization: I am terrible at talking about my writing. I've actually always been pretty secretive about it. Perhaps this stems back from second grade. Story time:

When I was in second grade I wrote my first "book". At the tender age of seven, I was incredibly proud of myself, so I brought it in to school to show my teacher. Mrs. Gardener was her name, and looking back, she really was a wonderful teacher! I adored her. (There was only one time that whole year that I got my name on the board, I did something stupid, and then I felt so bad. Little young me felt so bad that I had done something wrong and disappointed my teacher.) She was soooo impressed with my book (or maybe the fact that I wrote something that long, complete with illustrations) that she wanted me to take it to the Principal and read it to her. Well, unbeknownst to anyone back then, but I have from severe anxiety my entire life, from as long as I can remember. I was TERRIFIED of going to the Principal, even though I clearly wasn't in trouble, but I did it anyway because I didn't want to disappoint my teacher. This is one of the few incidents of my childhood indelibly printed in my mind. I do remember going into the Principal's office and telling the receptionist that my teacher sent me there to show the Principal my book, and then the Principal (probably taking the time out of her busy day to listen to the dumb story written by a shy seven year old second-grader) sat me down in her office. She acted very impressed with my book. Boy, looking back, we really had some fantastic educators in my school system.

So what's the point of all that? Although the experience should have taught me to be proud of my accomplishments in getting something written down, instead it kind of backfired, and I became much more secretive. After all, I didn't want to get sent to the Principal's office again.

I wrote two sequels to that first book. If you really want to know, it was called "Molly the Winner." Come on, I was seven. Molly was a ballerina (like me!) who had to defeat an evil witch (not unlike the fight scene with Ariel vs. Ursula at the end of The Little Mermaid, which came out that year). The two sequels were about two friends of Molly's that I made up, and I wrote these in the third grade. These too were illustrated (I used to really want to illustrate my own books, until I finally learned years later that I'd never have the true talent for it). I even taped paper onto the front of the notebooks I used to write the stories in and did my own cover art.

I took a few year hiatus from writing after that. Middle school, drama, puberty, all that crap. I never did return to Molly's world. She was left behind along with the last vestiges of my childhood. During those years of ages 11-14 I was in an awkward stage of reading. I had always been an avid reader ever since I first learned to read, but I wasn't reading books at my reading level. I don't know what it was - this was before Harry Potter and Twilight and other really famous Young Adult books. The genre did exist, but I didn't know about it until later. I was still rereading The Babysitters Club books.

At fourteen I saw Star Wars for the first time (not counting reruns of Return of the Jedi on TV - this was before I learned to read, so I asked my dad to translate Jabba the Hut's subtitles for me). I suddenly became very interested in the world of science fiction and fantasy. It resonated within me. I was a shy awkward teenager wasn't a big fan of real life, and picking up my father's old novels (mostly Star Wars sequels and Dragonlance) took me away to incredible new worlds.

I still hadn't taken up pencil and paper to write again until I began reading the Young Jedi Knights Young Adult series. I woke up one summer morning, right after my fifteenth birthday, and said to myself, I want to write a story about twin brother and sister, just like that series. And so, I pulled out a composition notebook (the same type of notebook I wrote "Molly the Winner" in), and started writing. Thus the original version of The Greenstone was born.

I will save the rest of the talk about what I went through with the original version for another post. Today I plan on taking the laptop outside to write, if it's warm enough, or else it's back to my writing room with me. I have a couple of scenes that I wrote that need to be entirely redone. I'm not happy with the scene where Derrel teaches Robin to waltz being in his point of view, and then doing a subsequent scene from her point of view where she reflects on it. I'm going to make the entire thing from her point of view and perhaps scratch the second scene.

Then I'm going out to see Ironman 3 in the theater tonight. :D