How I became a writer

Hello lovely reader (s)! Here's my writer story!

So I guess I should start from the beginning, which is seventh grade.

Back then I had a group of friends who initially inspired me to write my first (and still incomplete) novel. These girls were the popular ones. They were very intimidating, and even though I was friends with them, I also fought with them. A lot.

At the beginning of seventh grade there was this other girl (let's call her A) who had joined the school the previous year. She was... not very moralistic; I guess. She was, most of the time, the reason for my fights with those girls. Anyway, seventh grade was tough. I was failing in basically all my subjects, and I had stopped caring about my future completely. I ended up getting distracted by the fights I had with my 'friends'. I became very withdrawn, and I wished I could become someone else.

At some point I realized that I could do that by writing. So I started writing, and I ended up creating a book called The Friendship Deal. I was so into it I created boy and girl characters in such a way that there was a boy for every girl, and vice versa. Now that I think about it, it was all idiotic, and I plagiarized from many Disney movies like High School Musical and Camp Rock, but I felt like I found my writing style, eventually. I ditched The Friendship Deal by the fifth chapter, but I was still very obsessed and attached to the characters.

By the time eighth grade ended and I was about to start ninth grade, I got another idea. One character, Stella Johnson, was to be the protagonist. I was bored of chick lit, so I just decided that I'd write a mystery novel about her... kinda. Anyway, I wrote an incomplete first draft during ninth grade, still making tons of mistakes, like not dividing the book into chapters, and not even making an outline for the book.

So yeah, it was another failure. I finished it in tenth grade, though. But I took a lot of inspiration from Pretty Little Liars, which was my favorite show of all time.

I self-published Stella's Secrets in eleventh grade, and I'm very proud of that, but it didn't turn out as well as I'd wanted it to. I didn't edit it properly, and so there were tons of left out corrections, so I published the book with all those errors.

Also, I was a little disappointed with the self publishing company that I chose, since all the people I worked with were not exactly clear with instructions. But Stella's Secrets is already out, and even though it's in the past, I still count it as an achievement because I didn't think I would even finish writing it, but I did! I'm glad that I made it my goal to finish the book, and I achieved it. It taught me an excellent lesson, and also, now that I'm looking back, it was the failure that made me realize I wanted to be a writer.

So I have finally moved on from Stella's Secrets. I wrote a second book, but because it was very much a high school based book, I couldn't write the third book-I'd just outgrown the story and the characters.

I consider Stella's Secrets to be my shitty first draft- my practice first novel, basically.

I have definitely grown more confident about my writing as of right now. I am three chapters away from my first draft of my latest novel, but I have also branched out-I am not longer telling myself I "can't" write a particular genre of writing or that poetry or flash fiction is "not my thing".

So yeah, that's my story!

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-May