Why do I write?

Every writer has to start somewhere. For me, the process began when I first started learning English, at the age of five. Now you might this is odd, but for me, it’s really the most logical beginning. You see, when I was young, I wasn’t exactly one who appreciated the written language, preferring TV, as a lot of other small children did. What I did appreciate was a good storyline, but then so did many other people. Only a small percentage of them ended up wanting to be writers, of that I’m pretty certain.

When I was five, I immigrated to New Zealand and started school. It was a totally different world for me, complete with a new language. I remember my first day at school. It was almost like my first day in this strange foreign country. The words of the teacher and my classmates flew by me. I didn’t know what they were saying. I had no idea what was going on. Before I started school, my mom taught me a few standard phrases, such as “I want to go to the toilet” and “I don’t understand”. The latter, I later recognized as being redundant. You see, I did use it, but the teacher’s reply was equally incomprehensible.

How I learnt the language is actually a blur for me. All I remember is that a few months after starting school, I realized that I understood the language, but now that I look back, I really have no idea how I learn it. Then again, that’s not relevant, is it? What’s important is that I do know it. My first activity ever in my English-speaking primary school was story-writing. That translates better into sentence writing for adults but for five year olds, putting together a comprehensive sentence is quite an achievement. I believe I copied someone else’s work, or wrote one word, because that word was on the wall, next to a picture. I think it had something to do with a horse. I don’t really remember, but I loved horses back then. We got to illustrate our stories in those days. That took longer than writing the actual story, but I enjoyed it immensely. I’d always enjoyed pictures, although they never turned out the way I’d imagined them in my head. As my language skills improved, my stories grew longer. By the time I was six, they were over fifty words long and always about the same subject; animals going on picnics.

However, I was far from a competent writer, even for my young age. My spelling was atrocious. Cheese was spelt ‘cs’ and there were all sorts of incomprehensible spelling which I now cannot, for the life of me, recall. I always did enjoy imagining scenarios but putting them down into words was difficult for me. I never took my reading books home, being too lazy to do that. My language skills fell behind those of my peers. It wasn’t until I was seven that  I actually read my first little novel on my own. I don’t recall the title, but it was about a whale called Wilberforce, a shrimp called Melody and a crab called Simon or Sebastian. They were going on holiday. It was a big step for me. I started visiting the school library, and got out more books. My vocabulary grew and my spelling improved. For once, my writing was comprehensible by people other than myself.

As a child, I was always bullied; maybe it was because of my dimunitive size, maybe it was because of race, or maybe it was because I was different from my peers. I never knew and probably will never know. But what I do know is that because of that bullying, I retreated into books, especially when I was aged eleven to twelve. I read whenever I could because in fictional stories, I found friends; people who were also singled out and yet somehow became the hero. My love for stories and books made the others bully me more. I was in a school that placed the most emphasis on sports, and I hated sports. Even the teachers bullied me. For an eleven/twelve year old, I was sensitive.

I hated dirt (and we had to pick up rubbish at school, since they were too cheap to hire another caretaker or two), and every day was filled entirely with sports and games, which I was no good at. During the winter terms, every Friday, all the senior kids had to go out and compete in sports. There were only four to choose from: Hockey, Netball, Rugby, Soccer.

All through my primary school years, I played Hockey, but since I was not very good, the others bullied me, and I was miserable. So when I was twelve, I changed and played Netball instead. Bad idea. The teacher in charge of Netball, I’ll call her Mrs. L, was a sports fanatic and she also didn’t like me — I think it was because of racial reasons. The going was hard. It was cold in winter and yet for Netball, we had to wear short skirts. I wasn’t tall, so I could never get the ball. Worse yet, I couldn’t catch.

Sport became my nightmare. I got my parents to write me excuse notes so I wouldn’t have to do sport. Mrs. L. once called me out of class especially to tell me about responsibility to the team. She also picked on me for having ‘an unhealthy attitude’ towards sports.

The school was authoritarian. We were not allowed to eat indoors even if it was freezing outside, and we weren’t allowed to wear jackets over our school jerseys. Sitting in the wrong place warranted lunchtime detention. And no one ever learnt anything. Year sevens and eights mixed together and were taught together. We even did the same curriculum. Handwriting was still part of it, even though we were eleven, twelve and thirteen.

I grew so discontented, and I vented out my discontentment in dreams, and journal entries. Soon after I left that school, I began writing those fantasies down. That was the beginning of my actual writing life. I incorporated elements from books and TV into my writing. The stories became longer. In those stories, I was not the meek little thing that I was but a defiant young sorceress. After all, what child doesn’t dream of magic? The stories slowly warped into long drawn out fantastical tales, always with a heroine who defied all logic.

 I’m a short person with glasses and a rather boring appearance over all. When I was younger, I wanted to be beautiful, and in my stories, I could be. So writing was a way of doing what I want when I want. When I was fourteen, I discovered a new form of writing called fanfiction. A year earlier, I discovered Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and a certain elf called Legolas.

I fell in love with the handsome dashing elf prince and started reading stories that other fans wrote about him. Most of them were what we term ‘Mary Sues’. Basically, the storyline is the same for all of them. There’s a girl with some sort of tragic past and she and Legolas fall in love, goodbye, the end. Since I had no other knowledge of fanfiction, I actually read those, but they became boring. I googled and found more fanfiction, but this was not of the Mary Sue variation. I’d discovered the proper writers of fandom. They inspired me. My stories took on a twist and the only thing I ever wanted to do was to write a proper fanfiction. However, they all turned out to be Mary Sues and I gave up. During that time, I started on an original fiction and stayed with it for two years before dropping it.

When I was fifteen, I experienced a crisis of faith. That was also the year when Sir Ridley Scott’s epic film Kingdom of Heaven came out. I was an avid Orlando Bloom fan by then so I definitely had to see it. I had some knowledge of the crusades and I found the period fascinating. To be brutally honest, I didn’t enjoy the film that much at the cinemas, but I wanted the DVD anyway because owning it felt good. However, during my second and third viewings, I discovered that I was having a watered down version of the protagonist’s own crisis of faith. In him, I saw me, and I started liking that film more and more until it dominated my thoughts.

When I was sixteen, I once again took up the idea of writing fanfiction, except this time I actually had a character to write about and it would guarantee something that was not a Mary Sue. Balian, after all, was straight and male, and definitely not single. I started on my fanfiction Chance Encounter. It was about what would happen if Balian dropped into Middle Earth and joined in on the quest. It was a big success on ff.net and I was so encouraged that I wrote a sequel, and then another. All the while, I was rewriting my novel and trying to stay away from soppy romances. My journal entries, as  I track them, become more abstract and ‘artist-like’ as time passes. I hardly describe what I did each day anymore, and bullying has ceased to become a problem. I tried my hand at different styles, and started writing a screenplay. I also discovered blogging.

 So here I am now, writing this down. I still haven’t gotten published, but then, one can’t get published unless one has a typed up, refined draft of an original work. So here’s how I started to write, and why I write. From now on, I will post about my writing life.

 Sadly, there is still one thing I have not been able to figure out. This is called writer’s block.