• Don’t be a chicken. When you see the people who feed you and steal your unborn children walk towards you, run, don’t go to them. They just want you as their dinner.
• Don’t be a horse in a sea of unicorns. Instead, be a unicorn in a sea of sea unicorns.
• Don’t live everyday like it’s your last. Live it like there’s a sixteen-foot toad recording you with a shoe.
• Don’t dig into a person’s life with a shovel. Instead, go slowly with not a spoon, but a crayon carved into something that can dig.
• Don’t touch ostriches. They bite.
• Don’t listen to my adive. It sucks if you couldn’t tell already.

When I write short stories or more recently stories with chapters, I end up using more websites than I’d like to admit. I mean, I admit to using them, but some I’m embarassed about. For example, it feels like I’m always on this app called Wattpad, whether it’s to write or read other peoples’ work. I don’t know what it is for other people, but for me it’s a safe place for me to share my works, no matter how bad they are. It’s a very rare occasion to see someone bullying/being bullied. I stumbled into it when I first really got into writing, like it was something I couldn’t live without. I’ve now been on there for four years this August. It honestly hasn’t felt nearly that long.

I’d have to say that the most embarassing website that I use is meant to be used by pregnant couples who are stuggling to choose a name for their unborn child. I don’t know why, but the hardest thing about me for writing is coming up with my own characters. I literally spend hours scrolling through the site, picking tens of names that I might use, then narrowing it down to the very few that’ll actually be born into characters. It’s especially hard when you need a character to have this certain trait so you want their name to mean whatever the trait may be but have to search hours on end just to find the perfect one. Another hard thing is when you think you have the best name for a character so you use that but halfway through you find a better name so you have to go back to change it, which is a waste of precious time that could’ve been spent writing.

Last year in 10th grade, we used this website called Shmoop constantly for our essays. I have a love-hate relationship with this site becasuse it’s good for quotes from novels, but at the same time it doesn’t give you the page number, instead you get the chapter and paragraph. That, and it doesn’t have most books that I read in my free time so I can’t go on there to find a quote, I have to dig through the book instead.

Links- http://www.wattpad.com http://www.nameberry.com http://www.shmoop.com

At the age of ten, I wrote my first story. I used such old lined notebook paper that the pages were turning a crisp yellow. I was sat in the back of my fifth grade classroom inside a temporary bored. I got out my notebook that I had used a couple of years prior and a bright pink pen that I regret ever using and began to write.

I wrote about a girl who moved schools and got a crush on this guy, you’re typical story from a preteen girl. I still remember drawing the crappy stick figures and whatever else it was that I drew. And for some reason, I still have it somewhere in my room.

Then a year later I got a little notebook that I could write private things inside for Christmas. At first all I wrote were daily updates as often as I could like a diary, but then a few months later, I got an idea for what you could call a play. I had the most stupid names for the characters, the worst plot and dialoge. I loved writing that play so much that I spent all the time in the world on it, as my younger self would say. Because I haven’t looked through that book in quite a while, all I remember about the plot is that there was a little boy who was friends with a random ghost and his cat, but I absoloutly remember the part where the bully and his teacher had a huge verbal arguement, written in all caps and loads upon loads of exclimation points. I regret writing it, but at the same time I don’t.

Now at the age of sixteen, I’m writing more than ever. I’ll literally write anything from fanfictions to teen fiction, but I try to aviod non-fiction as much as possible.

I remember in January I had to write a 1500 short story for my creative writing class. I fell so deeply in love with that piece of work that I made that the epilouge for a short story that came out to be about six chapters. I worked so hard on the first draft and on creating my characters which to me are family. My all time favourite character from that story has to be Bob Charles, the worst interrogator possible. But the character I’m most like would have to be Jaxon. All I have to do with it is go through the whole editing process and debate whether or not to change the title.

A few weeks ago, I started writing a story that’s far out of my comfort zone. I mean, it’s teen fiction, but it’s also romance. I’ve thought about scrapping what I’ve written and abandon the story, but when I reread what I had already written, I fell in love with the main character’s little sister. It’s just crazy what writing can do to you.