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Becoming A Writer

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I started writing fiction in elementary school, and never looked back. Tucked away among old report cards and craft projects, my mother still has the multicolored notebook containing my first short story, written when I was in first grade. (It's a treat. I may share it here at some point.) So, when I say that writing in ingrained in me, that it's part of who I am, I mean it.

When I was planning for college it was my dream to become a writer, but I knew that I wasn't living in a time where I could hang my hopes on becoming an author. I turned to journalism, which I still greatly respect as a professional field, but it didn't have what I was looking for. The same goes for screenwriting; I may have put an emphasis on it while studying television and film, but my heart wasn't in it. For me, it was and has always been creative writing - short stories, novels, poetry on occasion. …show more content…

I want to write more, that I need to write. But first? Reading. If you've read Stephen King's On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft you're likely familiar with his words: "If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut." For someone who has loved reading for longer than writing, I let it slip away, reading only a few books each year. Becoming a reader again gave me the opportunity to explore more books about writing as well. They haven't all been as pivotal for me as On Writing, but that doesn't mean I haven't learned, that I didn't find value in their

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