I started to become fond of writing when I was 11 years old, during my sixth and last year in elementary school. My only influence at that time was these high school literature textbooks that featured poems like Poe's "Annabel Lee," Whitman's "O Captain, my Captain," and some other excerpts from Browning, Keats, and the others, and short stories like Jan Neruda's "The Vampire," and Anatole France's "Our Lady's Juggler." I tried to write my own set of poems and prose and somehow got to finish some verses and paragraphs before concluding how terrible my works had been before (although I still write terribly hitherto).
The first story I finished, or so I remember I did, was some kind of a slasher type of plot, with a serial killer killing scores of people narrated in very bad details. I remember he had a somewhat of a symbol he leaves within the crime scene after every murder he commits, may it be on the victim's body or on the walls or wherever. The symbol was "&" or the ampersand symbol, which I called the thirteenth sign, which was also the title of that short story. Oh, there's the word: short.
A female classmate of mine, aware of what I had been doing, offered to encode it in a computer word processor and have it printed out in a hard copy. I agreed with the offer, thinking how nice it would be to see something you have written getting computerized on a paper, feeling authorship like you have just won the lottery. So the night that followed she got possession of my first and only draft of the story and encoded it on Microsoft Word. She gave me the printed output on the day that followed. Five or six pages of double-spaced narrative about a deranged serial killer and his thirteenth sign.
I took it home like a trophy and showed it to my parents and my eldest brother, who owned those high school textbooks I mentioned above. They read it and the next moment I was at the verge of cursing how bad the work was. It was a work of vague lines and conversations and pointless plot and damn, it was just that bad. My brother told me it was not a short story. It was a "very, very, very short story." I hid it somewhere and I have never seen it again.
The next one I wrote was a zombie apocalyptic story that was even worse than the "Thirteenth Sign." I also have never seen it again.
I wrote consequent stories and poems that were mediocre and terrible, apt for me to become discouraged with writing. For months I was scrawling on random notebooks and purposely bought ones. But I had never written anything that was good enough. I thought, "Yeah, I must have been tricked and made to believe in a talent I thought I had, where I actually do not." I had a writer's block, even if I was not a writer. I dumped writing for the next months.
The light, albeit faint, at the end of the tunnel came during my third year High school, when our English class introduced me to the innocent gem that was "The Last Leaf." It is a short story written by American writer O. Henry (or William Sidney Porter). The story not only inoculated me into a broader look at the craft, but also magically pulled me out of my slump and then pushed my hand to write successive short stories, one after one after another. Although, when I look back at them now, they're still the "very, very, very short story" I had once had made.
But clearly I was starting to show some promise. Or whatever.
In a course of one and a half month, I was able to churn out about thirty short stories, with at least thirty more titles still as ideas in line after them. At that very moment, I felt I had trudged a long trip toward being a writer at last. Then I promised myself that I should be able to write at least hundred before I turn twenty. I was fourteen then, and given the six years allowance ahead of me, there was not a bit of pressure rocking me, sir.
Now, there was this advice given by Stephen King, the writer out of Maine who consistently makes laundry a dirty work since Carrie, about writing and writing successfully--'cause those two aren't the same, obviously. He said that one has to find about 4-6 hours of reading and writing per day, otherwise, one should not expect to be a successful writer. So, yes, talent is, as will be, not enough to succeed. One should add hardwork and patience into the mixture.
But I am a lazy bastard. There had been times when I felt my Panda pen weighs almost as heavy as a fucking bridge. I wrote with the old method of pen and paper back then. Even with the advent and the occasional availability of a computer, I would always prefer to do the handwritten way. So through all the coming years, I had gone in and out of my slump, and the rate of going in defeats the rate of going out by a tremendous odds of 100 steps to 1. I got stuck up with the thirty short stories and eventually I exhausted all the six years without even going halfway of my target.
Of course, the bitter despair following that disappointment was almost immediately dissolved with my fixed thought of changing my path of career. Anyways, it was not about composition or creative writing that I had took up in College. I graduated a degree in Math using up four and a half years. Yes, I found a new love, and it reciprocated me with the same love I had for it.
I am quite good with analysis, so I figured I could pave me some way toward a career in Statistics, perhaps at least. Teaching, typically appointed to a graduate of this major, is but a thing in the stellar future. I would teach someday, but teaching early in my nascent stepping into the "real world" is one I am not considering yet.
So I went on and in a competition with other graduates for jobs in the field away from writing. It had been a promising path, though. I got to savor a more comfortable life from my employment.
But after almost three years, I found out that the heart really tends to turn itself back into the place where it feels most at home, despite having led it into a different path. After days of exhausting myself, days of trying to turn about my body clock, I eventually found myself before a word processor again, ultimately begging that I might get another chance to try it out again. After all, writing proves to be the only thing I can do anytime. Writing is my comfort zone. The opportunity to paint a picture out of words is what I had really needed.
After all the journey into the other roads diverging in a yellow wood, after all the promise of a happy ending in an endless happiness in someplace else, Dorothy had all the point to say, after all, that really: "There is no place like home."
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