My Writing Origin Story
Why do superheros need origin stories? "To explain how they got from ordinary guy to superhero while providing motive to become one" say the nerds. That is very true. And some of these origin stories resonate with us decades after their first telling. Spiderman's origin story has remained essentially unchanged since Stan Lee first penned it, even in adaptations. Same with Batman. Superman's origin is so well known that the All-Star Superman comic book series was able to condense it down to four panels and eight words.
Well, writers are a lot like superheros. Like Bruce Wayne deciding to use the image of a bat to strike fear into the superstitious criminal mind, we writers all had that moment where we decided to become a writer.
When I was in the early grades of elementary school, all my teachers were stunned at how good of a reader I was. My kindergarten teacher thought my parents did an excellent job of teaching me to read. Except my parents thought the kindergarten teacher was the one doing the excellent job of teaching me to read. And, honestly, to this day I'm not sure how I learned to read, because I honestly can't remember not being able to do it.
And I wasn't just literate. I was precociously literate. I was reading the works of Laura Ingalls Wilder in the first grade, and only made slow progress on them because my attention span hadn't caught up with my reading ability. Second grade saw me reading the medical encyclopedia's that my mom had in the house (which meant I skipped the birds and bees talk with my parents). I was always looking for a good book to read, whether it was the scriptures or an encyclopedia or a chapter book series. Even my dad's textbooks weren't off limits to my brain, as they were way more interesting than what the teacher was saying in class.
I always had writing assignments in class that I dutifully fulfilled, but apart from that, I would occasionally write stories for my own pleasure. Obviously the quality was what could be expected from a tween girl, though the content was a little unusual. One story I remember in particular was about Counselor Troi from Star Trek: The Next Generation (which I was practically raised on) running a Little Red Riding Hood program on the Enterprise holodeck. I never put it on fanfiction.net, but it was the first piece of fanfiction I ever wrote.
And then, Lord of the Rings happened.
I had first read The Hobbit some time before I watched the Peter Jackson films for the first time, but found it a bit too childish for my tastes at the time (not surprising, since Tolkien told the story to his young children). Then I watched Fellowship when we got the DVD, and I was hooked. I thought to myself "If the movies are this awesome, the books must be even better!" So I got my hands on copies and was quite happily proven right. And then, around 2004, The Silmarillion came into my life. It was during this time that I officially discovered fanfiction.
Of course, these were not the only fandoms shaping my teen mind. 2002 brought the Kingdom Hearts video game series. 2006 was the year that Avatar: The Last Airbender hit television screens. And I still loved Star Trek and even liked the Star Wars prequels on first viewing. Emphasis on first viewing.
By the time I graduated high school, I was up to my ears in fanfic ideas. I was also up to my ears in mental health problems. I didn't learn to drive until I was twenty-two because of my anxiety. This anxiety also affected how secretive I was with my fanfic ideas. How could I tell someone I was a writer when all I wrote were legally questionable stories using copyrighted characters and a few original characters who were probably Mary Sues? Surely they would reject me for not being a true artist, or worse, for being one of those basement dwelling nerds that are so obsessed with fiction that they had no social life. It actually took a psychiatric ward visit the Christmas of 2014 for me to consider that maybe I wasn't a hermit because of fandom obsessions, but because too much social interaction can physically drain me and that I was a wallflower because I'm on the autism spectrum.
Of course, even now I still find it hard to share what my wip is with people around me in anything except broad terms, but I met Jeb Bush in second grade and my parents found out on the news, so I've always been a bit tight lipped when it comes to a lot of things.
There was a point in my early young adulthood (before the aforementioned hospitalization), when I tried to abandon fanfic writing all together for some reason. I got a subscription to Writers Digest and got Fiction Writing For Dummies and tried to come up with original ideas, but in the end, it just wasn't as much fun as fanfiction is for me right now. A day may come when I'll write something I can legally make money off of, but it is not this day! This day I write fanfic!
Looking back, it's hard to tell just when I decided to become a writer, because as far as I'm concerned, I've always been one.