My writing has evolved over the years I’ve been writing, starting from when I was smaller. I didn’t actually think I started writing until late high school but apparently that isn’t the case. I’ve been writing stories since early primary school but that’s all they were when I was writing them, just stories. It wasn’t until I started thinking of ‘big ideas’ that I considered myself an aspiring writer.

Most of my stories when I was younger revolved around pre-existing worlds/concepts of other stories. Kind of like fan-fiction in a way. I wrote fairy-tale like stories that were meant for showing to other kids. As I got older, around eleven, I was more or less writing adapted fan-fiction. Like how you can look at commercial fiction and see that it’s just riding the wave of something else that blew up. That’s how I wrote, wanting to immerse myself in other stories and just escape away from where I really was and who I really was. Around twelve and fourteen is when my own stories really started brewing. Where I was sitting down with original ideas and breathing life into them. It was kind of like lighting matches over and over, until I built a bonfire around fifteen is when I started to find utter joy in creating my own worlds, building my own characters and immersing myself in these beautiful paper terrariums I had made for myself. It was around eighteen, when I was ready to graduate and enter university that I was thinking about how to write for others. By then, I’d already received my first rejection slip from an agent and it dawned on me that my writing was mostly childish fantasy with no substance. People loved my writing at school, but short, spontaneous stories wouldn’t carry me through an entire novel if I didn’t start working harder on creating substance and working on my skills in my writing. Through nineteen to twenty-one, I still wrote for myself. I considered the writing as it would be read to others, working harder to produce better quality work, but the stories I was writing were still for me. Most them involved ways where the world was changed for the better because I felt powerless in the real world. Many of them involved dark themes and I towards that latter end of this period, I stopped writing fantasy. Around twenty-two, when I started this degree, there was a massive shift in the way I wrote. Works that I had been working on forever were suddenly re-made (and became so much better) and I had to think a lot more about finding that line between my interests and the interests of reader without ever feeling like I’d lost my integrity and was writing about something I didn’t care about. During the first couple of years of my degree, I actually struggled to write my own things but did fairly well in assessments. Though I didn’t do any substantial writing, many good ideas began flourishing and I began honing the specifics of stories to increase their credibility and create effective pieces that could immerse others. I have experimented with different styles and thought about different themes and have also started actually aiming for writing as a profession and thinking what ethical and moral decision I might have to make when becoming part of something like the writing industry.

I used to think that writing was simply just that, that I wouldn’t have to think about anything beyond writing a book and having people love it or hate it. But there is so much that I have to think about and work on, having either learnt it from this degree or people I’ve met along the way. I research topics for my writing to give them integrity now, rather than just creating a new world where ‘what I say goes’. I deal with topics more subtly and look closely at how hard I want to push my own agenda in my writing if I have one. I think about how it will be received and how it will impact people. I think about if it’s right for this reader’s climate. I think about a lot of things that I didn’t think about back then.

In terms of my actual writing, putting aside the changes of fantasy to more magical realism, my writing has improved overall (which, if it hadn’t, I’d be wasting my time). I prefer to write in first-person now, even though I loathed it when I was younger. It was all about the control over anything and everything in the story by writing as god but now I think about how well the story is going to work if it’s in first or third person and sometimes re-write stories to switch the P.O.V because I think it’ll work better in the other now that I’ve taken some time to look at it. Description is still my favourite part of writing but I’ve definitely improved in dialogue and sometimes this is considered the strongest part of my piece. I do a lot better in blending information with what’s happening, having used to write as if everything was an exhibition that needed to be explained to the reader before anything occurred in it. My plots and what happens in stories is also a lot more realistic, brushing aside the desire to write it how I want it to be and rather writing it how it is and how it comes. It’s no more about that little girl who struggled and then got everything she wanted, it’s about that little girl’s struggle and how she worked hard to get at least some of the things she wanted.

It really is all about maturity in the person that translates to maturity in the writing. Now that I am twenty-four, I have a lot more experience and knowledge than I did before. These aren’t nests of stories that take place in my head but cultivated trees that could happen somewhere.

TLDR: I got better at it and I’m going to keep getting better at it.