How I "Got Into" Writing

One of the questions I hear authors get asked all the time in interviews is, “how did you get into writing?”. I always wonder if authors are just as perplexed as I am when they hear this question. “Get into writing”? Writing isn’t like a musical instrument, which you actually have to pick up and learn. Writing is something we are all taught to do from about the age of three or four. And children make up their own stories way before they have learned how to correctly hold a pencil.

So I’ve never really accepted that writing and creating a story is something you have to “get into”. I see it as something every child has been doing from the minute they started dreaming. But to give a less philosophical and more definite answer, I was writing from a very young age. But when did I start writing. When did I actually think to myself ‘I can do this seriously’? I was sixteen. But the process that led up to it, began much earlier than that. It started with one fangirl who discovered through her friends that maybe she could indeed do something with her life, and not just sit, be lonely and watch movies forever.

I have no shame in admitting that I was the social outcast of my year – not the only one admittedly, but as I soon learned in school, being a social outcast yourself doesn’t make you safe from the other social outcast’s wrath (and they are no less vindictive than the popular people). Words like ‘nerd’ and ‘freak’ were normal modes of address for me, and while I bear these labels with pride now, I had less grace and even less backbone back then, and took my slated position in school very badly. My self esteem was rock bottom for most of my school career, and I was convinced that I had no talent in anything, save a rather strange ability to recite movies and tv shows almost word for word.

I’d dabbled in story writing ever since I was six – writing short ones about my teddies, and daring adventures with my friends, like any self respecting child with imagination does. But these were little projects to amuse myself, and of no value, or so I believed, to anyone.

But then I turned sixteen and something amazing happened.

I’d been loaned off my friend Tai (or as she is sometimes known, Meuble) a rather hefty wedge of paper that was titled “Harry Potter and the Something or Other” (and which I do believe I still have a copy of somewhere in my room). This rather impressive mass of pulped trees, had been written by two of Tai’s friends, who were dabbling in the art of Harry Potter self insert fanfiction.

I was completely enthralled. The concept of putting yourself in someone elses story and having your way with it had never occurred to me. My mind started ticking over ideas and possibilities. I knew I wanted to try this. But I had no idea how to go about it.

On a whim, to see if I could provide my mind with inspiration, I began compiling lists of completely random things, among my limited circle of friends. Asking them what animal they would be if they had the choice? What magical/super powers would you choose for yourself? If you could own any mode of transport, what would you pick? And suddenly, a new idea took hold. A little story, just for fun, involving me and my five best friends, and all our answers to my favourite questions.

This ‘little story’ quickly evolved into Random Scribblings of Bored Minds, a collaborative effort between all of us, that ended up spanning 88,583 words long, taking us into outer space, turning our skin yellow, violating many speeding laws, and traumatising Lord Voldemort with hugs.

And I was having the time of my life! We were our characters! We were doing things we would never be able to do in real life! We were being ourselves and getting away with it! We had a loose but definitely existent plot going on! We had a talking lyrebird and a cursed emergency water landing button! It was exhilarating!

Slowly it dawned on me, that not only was I creating something fun, but I was actually good at it. I was churning out pages like a machine, and to my untrained sixteen year old eye, they were pretty good. Certainly most of my class bullies could not do this – the only out of class writing that they participated in was sending text messages containing gratuitous use of the letters “OMG!”. Obviously now the curtain of cynicism and self editorial has fallen over me, and some parts of that story make me groan. But even now, eight years on, I still laugh at the jokes, and smile at it in the same way I would smile at a child trying to build a treehouse out of leaves and fistfuls of mud. Because it was the moment when I realised that contrary to what the rest of my year thought, I actually had some fucking talent!

And the means to develop it were only moments away.

As previously mentioned, Tai had provided me with my first introduction to the world of fanfiction. But she was not going to leave it there – oh no. This was a world I was born for, and I am eternally grateful to her for introducing me to fanfiction.net. It was my paradise. The possibilities were mindblowing. I could practise writing whatever I wanted. I could let people read it and leave comments. And most importantly – it was the internet, and I had a penname! Nobody knew it was me! I trawled for months, and then eventually worked up the courage to start posting.

Like most people joining fanfiction at that time, my big love was Harry Potter, and so unsurprisingly my first fanfiction was a Harry Potter one, and like almost every fanfiction author, I look back on it now and perform the well practised headdesk manoeuvre. But I will never delete it, because it represents the start of my serious writing (now I had deadlines to meet and fans to please as well as myself) and most importantly, is a reminder of important lessons that I learned along the way.

I did learn, and I blossomed. I taught myself about description and dialogue. I learned how useful a thesaurus was. I discovered the perils of shipping and fangirls. I figured out how to leave clues to my plot all over my story. I learned that characters have to grow and change in order to be interesting. I discovered a love of yaoi that will last a life time. Even as I finished my A-Levels, left school and headed to the big scary world of university, I never looked back. Why would I? Writing had become a friend, and a flower of self confidence that now bloomed in my hands.

University was the structuring of my talent. The rules of grammar, spelling and punctuation that I had missed out on by not doing any English related A-Levels now came back to haunt me, and I had to teach myself quickly where all those curious little marks went. Fortunately, there were Emmersonne and Yuallica, who encouraged my ideas, and would introduce me to the literary miracle of NaNoWriMo.

By the end of my first year of university, I was moving out of the Harry Potter fandom, and had been camping happily in the Yu-Gi-Oh! fandom. And as the summer holidays began and I vanished off to Portugal with some friends for a holiday, I had another project in mind that was soon to become one of my proudest achievements.

If fanfiction had thrilled me, crossovers were a dimension that I completely adored. After the enjoyment I’d found in doing Random Scribblings, I knew I could be good at crossovers. Reading Harry Potter and Yu-Gi-Oh! crossovers was a thrill, but I realised very quickly that they were all exclusively about Voldemort getting his hands on Shadow Magic, in some form or another. And while there was nothing wrong with this format, I wondered to myself if I could not try something different. Of course I knew that season four of Yu-Gi-Oh! is a source of constant debate in the fandom, with some liking it, some tolerating it, and some ranking it with the same disgust that they would direct towards a corrupt politician, smothered in cocaine. I knew that some people would hate it. I knew that I was jumping on a bandwagon. But I wanted to write it, so off I went.

The results were phenomenal. I wrote almost 400,000 words, the most I’d ever dedicated to a single project. I finished it, which was an achievement that I had only been able to do a handful of times. And seeing the reviews come in was one of most rewarding experiences in the world. Yes, the sequel sat in limbo for about three years. But it is a mark of how much my crossover meant to me that I eventually did pick up the inspiration again. And the beauty of it was that after so long, watching how my writing had improved filled me with one of those cliché warm glows that everyone bangs on about.

Speaking of cliché  it would be remiss of me not to mention the Anti-Cliché and Mary-Sue Elimination Society, the brainchild of my rather brilliant and crazy best friend, Emmersonne. You would have thought after so long I would have had my fill of self inserts. But no. This was far too good an opportunity to pass up. And as the few stories grew to over two hundred, and our number of members expanded from two to over twenty, I found my circle of friends expanding once again, and most importantly, lurking in that circle, was someone I would soon call my boyfriend.

On the writing front, the Society reminds me to lay back and enjoy the ride of writing sometimes instead of editing myself inside out. And it too was a learning curve. I found myself developing a sense of humour. Not the kind where I rattle off jokes every few minutes, but a very real and cynical type, based on the three S’s of British humour – Sarcasm, Self Depreciation, and Deadpan Snarker. Parody was taking the piss in a beautiful way – and I really really enjoyed doing it. If only I had developed that particular skill back in school...

I of course wrote other things as well in this long period of eight years. There are more unfinished stories on my computer and in my memory stick than I’d care to count. There are countless self inserts that have now been hidden away from the light of day. And deep in these folders are my impossible fantasy worlds, my sappy teenage chick lit, and my poorly written sex. There are hundreds of characters, who I still love in their own way (even the villains). Several of them have gone to sleep deep in their stories, while others come out every so often for playtime. I have an entire cast who have been rehoused in different stories four times! I have now found a world that I think works best for them, and plan to go back to it someday. I have a fanfiction that I started five years ago, and which I have now unearthed, dusted off, and decided to start slowly rewriting. I have a piece of cliché, sappy chick lit that I look at every so often, and wonder if it still has potential.

And of course, my novel sits front and centre of my non-fanfiction related stuff, currently plodding through its second draft. Sometimes I love it. Sometimes I get frustrated with it. But this is a healthy relationship, (not something I just “got into” like a musical instrument), and I will see it through to the end.