How I Found Writing

Happy Friday! Today we have a guest post from Sara from over at WhatANerdGirlSays! You can find my guest post on my Not-So-Guilty Pleasures here. I’m looking to do more blog swaps in the future, so let me know if you’re interested. Now read on for Sara’s post!

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I have a kind of cheesy story on how I found out I was good at writing.

See, in my family, it was all about sports. Everyone in my family plays a sport, and so I played every sport on the planet, or so it felt like. And I just was so horrible at all of them. As much I loved sports, and knew the rules and what to do, my body just didn’t seem to agree. I had two left feet, I have no hand-eye coordination. I failed sport after sport after sport. It didn’t help that I was also a head shorter than most other girls my age.

In fourth grade, I had the most wonderful teacher in the world. She was so creative in her ways of teaching. To teach science, we had dress like an alien day. To learn math, we ran a restaurant, and parents came in and ate our basically microwaved food. We always did really fun stuff, but one of my favorite things we did was Writer’s Workshop. We wrote stories once a month, kind of depending on the season. In September, we wrote a back to school story, in October it was Halloween and November was Thanksgiving.

December was obviously a winter story; not Christmas because that’s not politically correct but a winter story. And for some reason…I didn’t do it. I didn’t write a story. Of course, I don’t remember why. That was a long time ago. But I didn’t write one and it was due on that last day before Winter Break, when everyone has parties and no one actually learns anything that day.

But I was punished. I forgot to write my story so I had to spend my entire day writing my story so I could get credit for it, and it was away from all the fun party stuff.

So, I wrote my story. In roughly about twenty minutes.

When I went to turn it in to my teacher, she was incredulous and definitely suspicious. I knew she thought there was no way I actually wrote a decent story in 20 minutes. I’m sure she thought that I wrote some terrible story just to get the assignment over with it so I could get to the fun party.

She stared at it for a long time, and then asked me if I really just wrote that in class. I told her yes, feeling confused. Then she went next door and showed the story to the 5th grade teacher…and then showed some other teachers. Then she called my parents.

Apparently the story was good. It was really, really good. And even more unbelievable was that I wrote it in such a small amount of time. It was good enough that she felt she had to show it off to other teachers, and she had to let my parents know of my writing abilities.

I always remember this moment in time. I still have the story somewhere in storage with all my other shining elementary school achievements and I always remember it. When I’m having a bad day, or having writer’s block or I just think, god I’m the worst writer in the entire world and I’ll never be as good as (insert author name), I think of that story and remember that I can write. Apparently I’ve been writing since I was 9 years old.

And its totally cheesy but that’s how I find my talent, that’s how I figured out that I would never be able to score a basket or hit a homerun, or score a goal, but I could write a story and that’s what I’m good at.

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Sara is a guest blogger from WhatANerdGirlSays.

April 5, 2013April 5, 2013 by whatanerdgirlsays Categories: guest bloggerTags: blogging, fiction writing, guest blogger, inspiration, personal story, writing 5 Comments