My writing origin story begins with a single book. Not The Hobbit or Little House on the Prairie or any other children’s classic, but with Choose Your Own Adventure #50: Stranded! My teacher in grade one or two read this to us and had us as a class choose which path we wanted as we progressed through the story. I remember that that concept just blew my mind: Wait—we get to choose what happens in the story?!? It inspired me to go home and write my first ever story (a straight up Choose Your Own Adventure/Boxcar Children fanfic, now that I think about it), which I never finished, but which began a lifetime of creating stories.

Writing that first story opened me up to writing other stories, which soon became my favourite type of assignment in school (see such classics as Life as a Pioneer, HELP!, and Two Brave Orphans).

Even as a child I wanted my stories to be big and adventurous. When we were studying ponds in grade three and had to write a story about a pond, I thought that was too small and too boring, so I made my pond really big (a.k.a. a lake) and wrote a story about a horse named Black Beauty who was kidnapped by wolves and imprisoned in a jail on an island in the middle of a really big pond, and had to be rescued by his friends Trumpet the swan and Duck the duck (I wasn’t very original in my names).

I have wanted to be an author since at least grade five. I know this because we had an assignment where we had to draw ourselves as our future job; I didn’t know how to draw a writer, so I simply drew myself surrounded by nature (because of course I’d live on a farm in the mountains and support myself off of my writing).

Writing stories continued haphazardly through middle school (more epic stories with girl main characters that I somehow never got around to finishing) and exploded in grade eight when I discovered some of my friends liked writing stories as well. We would often print our stories out and swap them, giving each other feedback and enjoying each other’s stories.

So this is how writing began for me. Most of my stories (like 99%) didn’t end up finished, because I didn’t know how to end them, or else I’d be consumed with a new idea and start writing that instead. Now I am at the point in my writing journey where I am learning how to stick with stories until the end, and how to figure out that ending.

My Writing Origin Story

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