How I Started Writing

I thought it might be quite interesting to write about how I started writing.

When I was in Primary school, at the age of about five, we had the task of writing a story. I didn’t know much about writing, but I did a weird little story about me and my cousin running around my street having an adventure. My teacher read it, and sent me to see the headteacher without a word of explanation. Obviously, going up to the big wooden door and knocking on it, sure I was in trouble, terrified me.

Only, I hadn’t done anything wrong. My headteacher gave me a huge metallic red and gold sticker, with an image of a handshake on it. A headteacher’s award sticker.

 

 

I guess I realized then that I could write, but my ambitions to do other things (I think at that age I wanted to be a power-ranger of all things) sort of stopped me, up until year two, when I started reading Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. And I guess it just clicked for me. I fell in love with those books, and started to see what a brilliant thing writing was. And the fact that the only times I can remember getting one of those big red and gold stickers was when I wrote, left a really big impression on me. By year six I was writing terrible stories and drawing awful pictures of the characters and passing them around the class. My teacher even set up a writing group, because I think she recognized I had a little spark of something.

I continued through Middle school, but in High School things actually took off. I was reading, and attempting to write my first novel, which I finished at fourteen. My headteacher substituted one of my English lessons, and chose to make us analyse the poem Two Scavengers in a Truck, Two Beautiful People in a Mercedes.  I wrote the word ‘alienation’ on the page, and he called me back after class. Once again, I thought I was in deep shit.

Instead, he started giving me books and getting me to write more. He also lent me a copy of the book The Writer’s and Artist’s Yearbook so I could attempt to approach publishers. And though I failed with that book (I was thirteen when I started it and it was basically 450 pages of Twilight plagiarism) it made me see that I could potentially do something with my writing.