Hello, you interesting soul who managed to stumble upon my brand new blog. I am certain I have made blogs before, but I never have the motivation to actually continue their upkeep. This is me deciding that I am going to put in a valiant effort this time.
Perhaps that can be a New Year's resolution, eh?
I am going to begin now by telling you a bit about myself. My name is Christina, and I have been writing since I was eleven years old. Form a very young age, I enjoyed playing video games (in the form of The Sims and all of the Final Fantasy games) and became attracted to the stories and characters. I would have this yearning to be able to see more of what happened, beyond the ending of the game, and that was what led me to fan fiction.
I started reading fan fiction, for various books and video games, sometime in the middle of elementary school. When it came to subjects like Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings, there were plenty of stories to choose from that I could read. However, when I started looking for stories about some pretty obscure pairings in Final Fantasy VII, it was more difficult to find anything, much less anything well written. When faced with this problem, I decided that, maybe, I should write something.
I have a quote, over there, on the right side of the screen, that says something along the lines of "if there is a story you want to read that hasn't been written yet, you have to write it." That is exactly how I first began writing: due to the scarcity of Final Fantasy VII fan fiction. I went through an extensive period of time, from fifth grade to seventh grade, where almost all of my free time was spent writing fan fiction for Final Fantasy games, Kingdom Hearts games, and a little Harry Potter and Avatar: The Last Airbender. Most of the time, it was underdeveloped, and I cringe when I look back on it.
There was one story, however, that I was consistently attached to. I began writing it in seventh grade due to the intervention of my best friend at the time, and it was the farthest I ever got with anything I had written. A few months later, however, I got my first real boyfriend. Apparently when I am romantically interested in real people, I lose any and all ability to write. Perhaps it is because I write fantasy, and having feelings for a real person grounds my emotions in reality.
I had a very long lull in which I wrote next to nothing. However, a few broken hearts and four relationships later, I began to get back into the swing of things. I had a problem, though. My writing style had vastly matured since seventh grade, and the new scenes I found myself writing just didn't fit with what I already had written. This was when I began to notice my need to create the entire plot on my own, and my need to follow a character of my own creation. Essentially, I was writing original fiction except with the additions of some characters that weren't mine and without the trouble of making the world on my own.
But then I had a dream. It was during my vampire-loving phase. The entire dream was extremely elaborate, but the main point consisted of me meeting my soulmate, apparently a vampire, inside a small bookstore. I barely remember the rest of it, but it was so epic that, when I woke up, I decided I needed to write about it.
I spent weeks creating all of the characters, and the world, and the plot. I had quite a bit planned out but, before I ever began writing, something happened that pulled me away from the story. Perhaps it was that I was over my love of vampires, or maybe I got distracted by some book. Probably both. But I completely scrapped the whole idea and tossed it out a window. Not literally.
I attempted, again, to return to my fan fiction. I came to the conclusion that I was not an adequate enough writer to be able to create a world on my own, so I decided to stick with borrowing other people's worlds instead. I was making a valiant attempt to re-write my favorite story, the one I had gotten the farthest with, because I have a very strong attachment to the characters that I created there.
Interestingly enough, I will probably have to delete that story if I do get this novel published, because two of my characters are very strongly based on two of the characters I created in that story. I eventually got to the point where I decided that, if I took all of the original characters I had ever made and put them all together, I would have an adequate cast for my own, original work. I made a valiant effort to do so, but it was simply too much.
It was not a waste of my time, though. I threw the plot out the window to fester in the dirt with my vampire story, but I kept some of my characters and concepts. I filed them away in a dark corner of my mind in case they should ever fit into something I wanted to write in the future. And then I entered another writing lull, though much shorter than the first.
In my senior year of high school, I do believe, though it could have been my junior year, I was sitting in my kitchen, talking to my mother and sister about how all I wanted to do was write, but I couldn't think of a single good thing to write about. My sister just started looking around the room, spewing ideas at me left and right. None of them stuck out to me until her eyes fell on my mom's coffee cup.
"Write a story about a bunch of people that have to live in really tall houses because there is something on the ground that makes it so they can't go there," she suggested. This came from her spotting a lighthouse on the mug. I was pretty confused at first, but I brainstormed with her for the rest of the night about what could be on the ground. I got a general idea of what I wanted to do, and from there the novel I am working on at present evolved and turned into what it is today.
For example, most people don't live in tall houses, though that was the initial idea. The stuff on the ground has a huge backstory. I dug into that dark corner of my mind for some of the characters and concepts I didn't throw out from my previous story, and I managed to meld it together into something I like and can see myself working on for a very, very long time.
And that, dear people of the internet, is how I became a writer.
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