I’m going to take a few minutes from carefully crafting wonderfully composed sentences into a wonderfully thought out and exciting novel for Camp NaNoWriMo to compose my answer to the WriYe Blogging Circle Question. I’m not sure if I’ve talked about this already on my blog but for the heck of it, I’m answering it again! The big question of the month is:

Why did you start writing?

     I’m sure there are plenty of answers to such a big question, but my answer if fairly simple and had nothing to do with writing at all. I started writing because I wanted to sleep.

     When I was about seven I had an awful time falling asleep (still do actually) and one night after whining about how tired I was and how I just couldn’t fall asleep, my mother gave me a little bit of advice which has shaped who I am now. My mother suggested that to fall asleep, that I just lie there and tell myself a story and that I would drift off. Desperate for anything to work, I did just that.

     So there I was, crafting myself more and more elaborate stories in order to get to bed. Certainly the next step after creating a story is to find pen and paper and start writing them down! I’m not really sure when this first started happening as I remember the earliest time as being in grade two when I was encouraged in my Extended Enrichment Program to write my stories down. I started simply enough with little silly stories about the kids in my class, which I was then encouraged to share with them!

   It was from those two things that the floodgates opened and writing became who I was! In Grade Seven, I had an unfortunate problem with making friends in a new school which turned into many a lunch hour in front of the library’s computers working on what had become a series about my former classmates. That ballooned into my first attempt at a novel the following year in my first year in high school. That first novel turned into a three part series (as my novels tend to do), and went from there.

    By the time I hit college I considered myself a writer and sought only to perfect my skills! To think, it all stemmed from not being able to sleep when I was seven…

How has your writing improved since you first started?

     Considering I started writing when I was in grade two, the only answer I can possibly give is “In every way!”. It started from simple changes that turned my small couple page stories into longer and longer stories. Those stories changed into a novel where I started to focus on adding descriptions into my walls of speech. Slowly I started to look at being more careful with point of view and tense, as well as being aware of words I was overusing or using wrong. In every stage of my life my writing has evolved in one way, even now I find myself focusing on perfecting my editing as I shape my novels for publication.

     I really don’t think that an author is ever really done improving their writing. Its a life long search to find that one little detail, that one little thing, that will make your writing just that much better!