Writer's Corner: A History of Writing and Why I Started Finally Writing My First Novel

Hey, everyone! Happy New Year!

I'm excited to share my first post on my writing experiences.

Starting my first novel was really daunting. If I'm completely honest, it's pretty much taken my whole life up to this point to actually start the novel.

I started writing when I didn't even know how to write yet. I would fill page after page with scribbles of a pencil, pretending to write the next great novel.

By the time I was eight or nine, I started writing short stories. I usually wrote about my current crush or MacGyver (who was my crush for a long time. Let's face it! He was one of the hottest characters in the 80's!) I quickly branched off into fantasy and science fiction. The stories were usually totally ridiculous and revolved around soap opera type of relationships in a spaceship. 

I also went to Duke Young Writer's Camp when I was in middle school. It was really fun and creative, and taught me to be excited about developing stories and plots. I vaguely remember writing a science fiction novel about an alien named Lena.

In college, I took several fiction writing classes my senior year, one of them from the now very famous Adam Johnson, who wrote the Pulitzer Prize winner, The Orphan Master's Son. I wrote several full length short stories at that time. The main problem with most of my stories was the fact that I had almost no description. The only thing I liked to describe was food. So people would salivate when they read my stuff, but they also felt like they were watching characters exist in a white box. I learned that even though I personally don't really care for description, there's a balance for everything.

After that, I cultivated a graveyard of abandoned novels that I started and stopped, most about a page long before I lost interest. I have about ten pages of a novel that's vaguely reminiscent of Divergent, a novel about a medical dystopia, a novel about an enchanted necklace, and the start of a contemporary novel about four friends in medical school. This went on through medical school and residency. During this time, my best friend bought me a notebook to start writing my first great novel, but somehow I couldn't get started.

It really wasn't until I started blogging in earnest last year, participated in the Writer's Cramp, and met a lot of authors who are now good friends, that I realized I should really do it. Plus, my best friend kept emailing me repeatedly, telling me I better start!
 
Finally, my sister told me that neither she nor I had the attention span to write a book. Because I'm just that stubborn and reverse psychology really works on me, I told myself, "Now, it's ON!" I was determined to prove herself (and my own doubting self) wrong.

And I did :-)

Have you guys ever written a book? Have you had trouble getting started too? What have your experiences been like? If you haven't, are you interested in writing a book? Why or why not?

My next post on Writer's Corner will be about how the writing process actually went!

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