Ideas come first, choose one and evolve it, then write it. That’s what I do, and it’s as simple as it sounds, no real complications there. But change, motivation, incentive, and punishment are not. Knowing what will change, how and why is not easy. Wanting change might be easy, or it might not, and it might come without the want or need of it. It could be for the good or for the bad, but it’s the job of yourself to understand the impact. With my life, the biggest change was how I saw writing.
Of course, I am a writer. It’s what I love, and what I do, but for a long time something was missing. A motivation that I never knew I needed. And for a long time, I hated writing, and eventually, I came around. But it isn’t that time yet. Needing to write in school and having parents that forced it upon me, by making me write without choice, didn’t help as they thought it would, and nothing changed. It made it worse, because I connected bad things with writing, so every time I needed to, all I could remember was what happened in the past. Just in 5th grade, at 9 years old, I could barely write a sentence, and my only motivation was to get out of punishment, or to get passable grades. To most people, along with me at the time, I thought that writing wasn’t exciting. I always loved creativity and building machines that never work, contraptions that had no function, and ideas for video games that were never going to be made, but writing was not a way to show my creativity. Of course, that all changed in 6th grade.
In 6th grade when I was 11, my teacher, Ms. [] incentivized creativity and writing. And creative I was, but I was not great at writing. Yet was the catalyst into a change I never wanted, but I’ve always needed. At first, I had no ideas, no plans, no interests, but I took on and searched the internet for ideas. These two simple things, the internet, and a good teacher. The internet gave me an endless supply of ideas, and Ms. [] gave me a positive outlook on writing, and that alone started my love for writing then and there.
Having ideas is different than putting them to paper, and I always have so many “great” ideas, but until then, I could never functionally put them to paper. I didn’t know what to do, and I told myself, “So what?” It was a changing point in my perspective. Ms. [] showed me many strategies for writing, but the biggest reason I continue today is that she encouraged it rather than forced it with punishment. A positive rather than a negative. I wrote and wrote, which led to scrapping and abandoning ideas. It was demotivating, but the simple fact that I now knew how to put my thousands of ideas onto paper, a key to a lock that had never been opened, I couldn’t and wouldn’t stop. Eventually I came to the fateful day where I finished one singular story, just a couple pages, but it had an end, along with a beginning and middle. This, at the time, it was my biggest accomplishment. A success.
In the span of only a year, I learned more than the rest of my lifetime. But looking back, seeing how creative I was, I could be so much better today if I started earlier. I could blame many things, but I blame myself, for not wanting change. To be hesitant to change, is to be hesitant of greatness. Caution is fine, if anything it good to have, but caution will always get in the way of greatness. Only now have I learned that, and only now have I truly become a better version of myself.