What I Have Learned about Writing

I think the biggest thing I have learned about writing is that the stories I write from my heart are my best stories that I have ever written. I have written hundreds of children's stories over the past 17 years or so and I am continuously writing new ones all the time.

When I write a story, the first thing I do is have a topic picked out in my head. From this topic, I pick out the set of characters that I am going to use for my story, the set of characters that will best suit the topic I have chosen. Say, for instance, my topic is going to be about the mountains. I would use either my Mountain Mike character or The Poor Mountain Family for that particular topic. Say, I wanted to write a story about music. For that topic I would normally pick my Billy Troll character or The Just Girlz character.

Once I have my topic chosen and my characters picked out, I will just start to write. As I write, the story forms and eventually the story will come to an end. If I sit and think about what I am going to write and how the story is going to end, chances are, that story will never get written. I must run with a fresh idea right away, to keep that idea fresh in my mind. I have lost so many story ideas because I never took the time to write them down. However, even writing a story idea down, for me, doesn't always work because by the time I do get to write that story, part of it is gone.

I find the best way to write a story is just jump right in and write it. I try to always finish up one story before going onto another because I find that if I have to go back to a half-finished story, it will never come out the way it was intended to. 

This approach may not work for some people because lots of writers like to plan their story out from beginning to end before actually writing a word of it. I can't work well this way. I find just diving right in and writing the story is the best approach to writing for me.

Writers need to be motivated to write. I find the best time of the day for me to write my best is late at night, after everyone has gone to bed and the house is nice and quiet. I don't like to be distracted when I write. A lot of times, if I am home by myself, I may turn some music on, but I usually don't turn the television on at all. 

Maybe one of the reasons I have written so many stories is because I have just jumped right in and written whatever has come to my mind. I don't sit there and mull over what I am going to write. Another thing about the way I write is that I don't ever know how my story is going to end until I have finished writing it. The ending always seems to come to me as I write.

Obviously I enjoy writing very much. Writing is my past-time, my hobby. A lot of times I have been told that I put too much effort into my writing and not enough effort into what goes on around me. That may be true but I also don't have bad habits like smoking and drinking that take me away from reality. Writing is my crutch. When I want to escape reality, i pick up my netbook and start writing. I feel it is far healthier of an approach to escaping reality by writing than it is to drink or smoke my life away.