When I was a kid, there was something called the “Young Authors Conference.” Teachers would get their students to make “books” and the best would go to the conference, which took place in a school gym somewhere with a bunch of other kids and guest authors. I looked forward to this every year because I really wanted to be a writer! And I still have a few of those books…
Looking back on these stories, I’m first struck by how ridiculous some of them are, but then I silence my adult critic and see what my teachers probably saw – a highly imaginative kid. I wrote about bubbles swallowing up the world, mysterious abandoned houses, invisible rivers, alien invasions, ant-sized towns, murder, sixth sense and demons. All without ever having been taught how to write a story.
Learning how to write or structure a story wasn’t part of the curriculum when I was in elementary school. It is now (at least in Ontario), but back in the old days the teachers just set us loose with pencils and paper and said, “Write a story!” My adult self often laments this – if I’d learned story structure at a young age, I could have been published by 18! Instead I spent my childhood blissfully writing stories without having a clue what I was doing…
But maybe that was a gift. What comes through in all of these harebrained stories I wrote as a child is how much fun I had creating them. I never worried that the story wasn’t good enough, that my protagonist wasn’t relatable, that my stakes weren’t high, or my ending unsatisfying. I didn’t know about these things. So I just wrote. And I loved every second of it.
I lost that feeling as I got older. The more I learned, the higher my expectations of myself become. That added stress. I had to write the best story ever! Every time! The joy faded and writing began to feel like work, which it is because I’m lucky enough to have a job where I’m paid to write. But I need to remind myself that I do this because I love writing and always have. That’s when I pull out these silly stories, silence my inner critic, and just remember what it was like to write the first fun thing that came into my head. No hesitation, no doubt, no fear. Then I hold on to that feeling and start to write…
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