My Disastrous Start to Writing: How I Discovered My Writing Style
Why it’s okay to keep writing despite early mishaps
It’s been a while since I’ve written on the topic of writing. The last one was practically in middle school when we were assigned to write the differences between active voice and passive voice and even that was purely academic.
I’m about to unleash how I discovered my writing style. Trust me; if I can do it, anyone can.
Let’s rewind the clock six years back when I was a seventh-grader who decided to embark on this adventure of publishing a novel on Wattpad.
The sole reason? A friend of mine decided to publish on Wattpad, and I thought, “Hey, why not give this whole writing thing a shot? I was always someone who’d taken a keen interest in trying out new things with no prior research on it.
To tell you that the novel was trashy would be an understatement. I titled it “The Last Vision” — a horror story featuring a protagonist (let’s call her Aurora because her real name escaped my memory) who had the misfortune of being blind from birth. Don’t worry; it gets weirder. She scores a miraculous eye surgery and is blessed with a pair of eyes, gifted by a shadowy character I never bothered to name because, well, middle school me had the creativity of a teaspoon.
And, you guessed it, she starts seeing visions of the future. So, yeah, it was a cheap knock-off of “The Final Destination” and all sorts of bizarre happenings went down. As for the details of the plot, I can’t remember a darn thing, but let’s just say it was a wild ride of randomness.
Oh, and the most interesting part is this — I conjured up a villain for Aurora: her uncle, who I brilliantly named Mr. Hysterical (I was a big fan of Goosebumps books, and that’s about as creative as I could get back then).
The climax was something to behold. Aurora and her merry band of friends discover that her new eyes were cursed by Mr. Hysterical, and the only way to fix the whole mess was to break into his creepy mansion and perform some bizarre rituals.
But then, as fate would have it, I realized I had no idea how to wrap it all up, so I decided that Mr. Hysterical should have a dramatic demise: he melted. Yes, you read that right. I actually described a scene where a character melted in the rain.
It was a hot mess. And to add a dash of poetic nonsense, Aurora’s newly acquired eyes melted too, hence the oh-so-fitting title “The Last Vision.”
Two years later, I eventually decided to delete that catastrophe. I kept it for two long years because I thought I worked pretty hard on it. But then I took it two steps further and deleted my Wattpad account and the disaster it contained. It was a step towards preventing my future self from facing unwarranted embarrassment.
But then writing cannot just end with one single cringe-worthy story, can it?
At that point, I was addicted to typing lengthy paragraphs and I just couldn’t resist making up all sorts of stories in my head. But I was also aware that I wasn’t cut out for novel-length storytelling.
And that was when I transitioned to poetry. I’d select a poetic quote from Pinterest and craft four lines relating to it. One fateful day, amid this newfound hobby, my school announced a poetry competition. I submitted my work based on the title they provided, and, lo and behold, it got accepted!
The moral of the story? Keep writing ahead. Try your hand at various writing styles until you find the one that suits you best.
It’s been four years since my poem graced the pages of my school, and here I am today, still writing, still learning. So remember, no matter how embarrassing your early writing attempts may be, they’re all part of the hilariously chaotic adventure of becoming a wordsmith.
Embrace your past mistakes and let them guide you on the path to becoming a better writer. Trust me; the writing journey is every bit as unpredictable as the dramatic meltdown of my villain.
The poem that was published in the school magazine is now edited & republished here —
Check out my other works —
