Writing Evolution

This week’s writing challenge is different than most. It’s something personal and different to each of us. As writers we all evolve differently. No two of us have the same motivations driving us. No two of us formed the same way. Stephen King’s writing style evolved from both ion and trauma. Anne Rice’s developed as a way to deal with the ravages of mental illness. My good friend Stefan Lear’s developed from deep seated emotional turmoil and a history of rejection by society.

Where does that leave me? It’s a good question with a multifaceted answer.

When I was a child my mother began reading to me. I can her reading to me daily and me following along. I struggling even at the age of two to appropriately sound words out that I perfectly understood in my head. I taking her books and reading them by myself even before the age of three and devouring full novels with words I didn’t comprehend or know the meaning of. I these moments of sheer joy and have for as long as I can desired to share this with others.

Times change and so do we. When I was four I began writing my first short stories. They terrified my teachers. I wrote about blazing fires filling the skies and washing over the earth. I wrote tales of aliens destroying the government and enslaving man. I wrote tales of angels and demons battling in the streets as families huddled behind heroes who bravely attempted to defend them. I wrote epics about wizened old wizards teaching the young how to lead and helping them ascend the throne to rule justly when the time came. And perhaps most importantly I wrote about concepts I didn’t know weren’t original at the time like the effects of communism on society and how black holes should detonate if the space around them was nothing but vacuum. All of these things scared my teachers. In many cases they thought I was unstable. I was brought in for panicked meetings with teachers and my parents all throughout grade school. My parents hated me for it. I never understood the fuss.

Walking into middle school I had several teachers begin to encourage me to write. One teacher in particular asked me to write a story about a student who jested that class was a dungeon. The prompt resulted in a story that she shared for many years to come about a dungeon beneath the school where teachers kept the bad students. It was during this period that I fell in love with the Sword and Sorcery genre and met the Dragon Riders of Pern. These stories influenced my first novel, and introduced me in the most direct way to the hero’s journey.

When I fell into high school my life fell apart and things became a blur. My writing changed again to something riddled with teenage angst and philosophical wondering. I finished my first and second books during this time frame. The first being the novel I started in middle school, and the second a non-fiction book my school used as a textbook to teach about Celtic culture for the year I finished it. Poetry became almost an obsession of mine as I poured full days into detailing my love and ion for my friends and the girls I dated. Overtones of despair and depression took me later as I neared the exit of school and my future looked bleak and dismal at best. Angst gave way into full on depression and despair in my writing as I neared my journey, and worries about the abuse I suffered that I voiced in poetry got me kicked out of school.

I pushed beyond all of that around the time the housing bubble collapse and the entire economy with it. I lost my first job on my three year anniversary of obtaining it and with it fell into deep depression and homelessness. It was at this time that I did a lot of traveling by foot and lived off and on with a woman who had been in the Auschwitz death camp. I was a skinny thing of only one hundred and twenty pounds at the time, so skinny and frail looking that I gave the poor woman flashbacks. She’d force me into her kitchen after I’d help take care of her estate and she’d force me to eat tables worth of food as she recounted her life under Nazi occupation. These stories flavored my writing even more and as I slowly got back on my own to feet they flavored my first somewhat professional project.

I started writing for a game forum when my fan fiction took off in popularity. The publisher was thrilled with this and asked me to continue writing and gave me an official title. It was an unpaid position but I was thrilled to have a readership for the first time in my life. The piece proved popular and at its height had more readers than the game had active players and spawned tons of fan fiction. It was vampire romance fiction and this was during the period when the Twilight novels were still being released. I had never heard of them at the time or read the genre at all. In all honesty I didn’t know what I was doing at the time. It was just a story that came to me and I loved it. Somehow it resonated with others, but it also drew the ire of some of the game developers staff and a number of stalkers. By the end of my time working for them one of the of the staff took it upon herself to destroy the game’s website because she didn’t like what I was writing, while a group of players had hunted me down to where I was living and managed to haunt me with stalkerish photos of myself and so much more. I never saw any of it coming and these events broke me mentally for many years become.

It was only a few years back that I came back to writing. My goal was to stay away from divisive works like I had written my entire life and fire other more artistic avenues to discuss the topics I had in mind. To this end I decided it was best to start studying the craft itself from a mechanical level so I could learn how to properly convey what I had to say without offending people. I had no idea how many technical details awaited me. At this time I hadn’t even heard of tropes, and my idea of deep story structure was the monomyth. I am now several years into this leg of journey and am only just realizing that this end of the pool is bottomless. I’m exhilarated by it. There is so much to learn about character archetypes, scenes, sequels, beats, structure, myth, and more than I can ever all at once that I wonder how a creative writing degree could even begin to scratch the surface of it all. And it is this part of my journey that inspired me to buddy up with authors, learn their secrets, and them on to you folks.

There is an entire world of writing out there and we all need help discovering it. It is my hope that by bringing this information to you that I help you get ahead in your writing journey and become the next JK Rowling. There are so many talented writers on this Amino, and I believe in all of you.

Where has your journey taken you? Where will your future lead?

#writingevolution