How I Started Writing

Every writer has an adventure.

Every writer and author has a start to there adventure.  All are different.  Some authors never have their work published and some do.  Some think of it as just a hobby and some think of it as something that they are very serious about it.  Here is how my epic adventure got started (well, the epic adventures of my characters).

I used to hate writing...like seriously hate it.  I would complain about writing anything.  Then, I went into 4th grade and had an amazing writing teacher!  She taught me how to write stories and I absolutely loved to write them!  They were never long, always about a handwritten page long, but they were adventures in themselves.  That year, I also developed my reading obsession, which has helped my writing tremendously.  Yet, after 4th grade, I wrote some, but not consistently and my stories were never longer than a few hundred to a thousand words.  From then on, my writing time waned, until basically, I stopped completely.

January 2014, I watched The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey for the first time.  It was my first association with anything related to Lord of the Rings, except for reading some of The Hobbit.  I was absolutely fascinated.  I wanted to know more, I wanted to know everything about Middle-earth, Hobbits, elves, dwarves, dragons, and all of the amazing creatures that inhabit J.R.R. Tolkien's epic land.  At that point, I barely knew about the characters of Lord of the Rings, just there names and what they look like in the movies, however, I had a dream about it.  It was a pretty weird dream, but I felt the strange urge to pick up a pen (or start up Microsoft Word) and write a fanfiction story.  And so I did.  It was really, really bad (mostly because I didn't know anything about LOTR).  From then on, I was in love.  I have written 3 LOTR fanfiction stories (all of which are incomplete, but one is almost finished) since then and both read and watched LOTR.  One of the fanfiction stories is currently in first place for my highest word count!

I know that I have vaguely told this story before, but I wanted to tell it in more detail. At this time, I would really like to thank my 4th grade teacher for starting me on the right track for being a writer!

Alea Harper