I know this may sound like a cliché to writers, but I never chose to write.
Writing chose me. I started telling stories not long after I could talk, and, by the time I was three, my parents starting writing down the stories I would dictate.
They were simple stories, and usually about cute animals or dinosaurs, but they had plots. Back then, I didn’t think of myself as a writer. I just knew there were stories going through my head and I would tell them.
Eventually, I started writing the stories down myself. They kept getting longer and longer.
When I was in second grade, I wrote a long story called White Beauty.
It’s not something that I would ever, ever think of publishing, but it was good practice, and it gave me more confidence in myself.
I’ve never really had a schedule for writing; the words just come, and I have to get them down on paper.
As a sixth grader, I turned in a vampire chapter book for my English Halloween assignment.
It got read to the class and they were completely caught up in it. It made me feel great that I wrote something other people liked.
From there I brought my stories to school and passed them out to a growing number of students and teachers who requested them.
When I was an eighth grader, both the Burbank Leader and Los Angeles Times stepped in and wrote articles about me.
Since then I’ve become a professional freelance writer. I’m no longer in school, and it pays the bills.
I’ve lost count of how many articles I’ve published, though I know it’s in the hundreds, and I’ve also done freelance work writing the English adaptation for Japanese graphic novels.
But none of this has changed my love for fiction and storytelling.
I still write fiction regularly and am actively pursuing a career in that, networking and trying to meet as many people as I can in the publishing industry.
The piece I’m attempting to sell first is a YA novel that’s something along the lines of “mythology meets high school.”
There’s nothing out there that’s been as personally rewarding to me as my writing, and I’m glad it’s such a big part of my life.