In fifth grade, I switched schools. My new school had a creative writing elective that everyone had to take. It was essentially an intro to creative writing where our English teacher taught us the basics of plot, characterization, setting, point of view, and other building blocks of writing. Some days we had prompts, some days we had free writing, some days we could read what we wrote to the class. I never did that.

Everything I wrote in that class was a rewritten version of whatever Disney Channel Original Movie was on the night before. I borrowed lines, characters, plot lines. If you’re curious, the movies I borrowed from was Twitches and Wendy Woo: Homecoming Warrior.

I remember listening to other classmates read their work to the class and thinking how creative all their stories were. I, too, wanted to create something all my own. So in sixth grade, I sat down and I wrote my first “book”. It was titled Everything, and it was about a girl who had everything but the boy she wanted. It was a simple story: there wasn’t any character development or any kind of arc, the plot wasn’t that great, and the setting wasn’t clear. But I was proud of it. I printed out each page, cut them to size, bound them together with pink craft string and a sewing needle I borrowed from my grandma. For a week, I carried it around with me everywhere.

Every summer afterward, I took writing classes. There I learned how to write fiction not just the building blocks of a story. I’ve been obsessed with writing ever since. I’ve found that there’s no feeling better than writing something and then loving it so much that you’re in disbelief that it came from you.

I love writing because I love creating. I love creating people–people that I want to be, people that I don’t want to be. I love creating places–towns I wish I lived in, cities I wish I could visit. Bost mostly, I love telling stories.