My Experiences Writing as a Child and Teen

I intended to write and publish a book before I reached adulthood. In my elementary school’s library, there were a number of books written and illustrated by children. I was very impressed by this and would have written one myself, only I’ve never been able to draw worth a darn, and the publishing company required that you illustrate it as well.


I entered a children’s writing contest in a local magazine three times in elementary school and never won. This drove me crazy, especially in the 4th grade, when another girl in my class won. She read her story in front of the class, and I didn’t think it was as good as mine. The pretentious part of me likes to believe that I never won because the judges didn’t believe that a girl my age could write such great stories…Right…Anyway, though I lost, writing the first of those stories, a mystery, when I was six years old, was what made me decide I wanted to be an author when I grew up (or sooner.)

I made my first attempt at writing a novel when I was in the 5th grade. It was a story about kids who were shrunken and put into little pebbles on the school playground. I don’t know how the kids ever got out, because I only wrote the first chapter or two. I continued beginning (and not getting very far on) novels throughout my pre- and early teens. Two that I put a lot of work into were a story about a gay vampire, and a story about a girl who sees auras and realizes that a woman she sees in a shopping mall is about to die. As you can see, even then my stories tended to be in the fantasy genre.

In my late teens I didn’t work on novels for two reasons. One was that I took several English/Writing classes in one semester in order to graduate from high school a year early and it burned me out. I didn’t feel like writing for a while. The second reason was that I was going through sort of an identity crisis and I was trying to find out who I was as a person, and I was unsure of what kind of story I wanted to tell. However, I did write a lot of poetry and a few songs during this time.

I never did complete a book during my adolescence, but the experiences I had writing during that time have helped build the foundation for the writing I do now. Maybe someday I’ll return to my childhood story ideas and actually complete some of them. I have already reused some of the poetry and songs I wrote as a teenager, altering them slightly for the novel I’m currently work on, The Magicians’ Chorus, in which spells are cast through music.