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I never thought anyone would care to read the chaotic narratives crafted in the shadowy corners of my consciousness. I brought sound to those silent spaces, but surely, nobody would resonate with them as deeply and perfectly as I. These were my stories. Quiet, strange, and top secret. These were whispered musings of a mind gone off the rails. These were companions, the bonds between them and I forged across interdimensional light years.
No one out there would ever bother to pick up a book written by some inconsequential, feverishly anxious young woman with a craving for the stars and a million stories written to quench it.
Believe it or not, the insecurities expressed here were not born in childhood. As a child, I believed I could conquer the world. I believed, with my whole heart, that I could become anything I set my mind to. A rockstar. An actress. A marine biologist. A model. An astronaut. An author. All of them felt within reach, and all at the same time. It was adolescence and adulthood that sent forth waves of doubt.
I didn’t just grow up; I grew into the mold assigned to me.
My new skin was sprawled tightly across my bones by the hands of fear, expectation, and self-criticism. My confidence was withering, and with it, my ability to see to the edge of my potential’s horizon. Now, I needed glasses to un-blur my future, and those glasses were given to me by a society overstuffed with rules and roles. They weren’t rose-colored. Instead, they were covered with a haze of monochromatic gray and embossed with the words:
“Comply, or starve. Behave or be left behind.”
The dream that had risen to the turbulent surface of my sea, the dream of sharing gateways into my worlds, began to sink. I was told by the sovereign elders of my middle school to be a bit more practical, to have back-up plans upon back-up plans. I learned without a lesson plan that kids who talk about uncanny encounters with fairies, aliens, mermaids, and vampires sit alone at lunch.
So, I tried convincing myself I could love life as a lawyer or a doctor. I kept the spacey rambles quiet around my peers and spoke with sterilized speech about the mean art teacher, football games, and fashion club. I complied to survive, and behaved to be accepted.
The Great Rediscovery
It was a balmy summer afternoon when my cousin turned her phone screen to me. It bled orange light, displaying the startup screen for an app called Wattpad. She raved about its endless stream of stories, all derived from other beloved works. Fan fiction, written by fans, for fans. She told me about the total anonymity of users and guided me through the process of account creation.
Just like that, I was a writer again, and I could hide behind a username inspired by the entropic shadows from which all my stories were born. Without leering eyes on me, I started writing again, and for no one but myself.
I wrote about every new interest. Rise of the Guardians, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Marvel, Creepypasta, and so on and so forth. I was never afraid to start a new story, fitted with a cover enthusiastically designed in PicsArt. I could swear the smile that spread across my face each time I edited “A Story By…” onto the screen captured sunshine.
I wrote daily, churning out thousands of words a week. Each one was a footstep in a journey, not a task or a chore. These were documented logs of my imaginative adventures. These were tangible keepsakes of moments lived in other dimensions.
I hadn’t expected anyone to read them, but after bravely pressing the Publish button, millions came my way.
In a matter of weeks, I started receiving kind comments from strangers across the world. They’d tell me I did a good job, comment on a particularly exciting moment, or suggest an idea of their own for an upcoming chapter. It made my heart sing. For the first time in a long time, I felt like my words meant something to someone other than me.
The last time I felt this way, I was seven. I’d been asked to read a short story I wrote to a class two grades below me, a high honor to a second grader. My story was, ironically, about a duck who grew up being urged to do duck-related jobs. I don’t quite remember what I thought of the duck employment market at that age, but I do remember what my duck wanted to do. My duck wanted to be a gardener. Against all odds and against the expectations of his waddling community, he pursued his dream and grew the most beautiful flowers for the world.
At this moment, as those kindergarteners smiled at me, I knew what dream I would pursue. My flowers would be books, and I’d happily spend my life trying to make readers smile the way those kindergarteners had. Sometimes, I feel like this story was a gift from my younger self, who knew I’d run into an issue similar to our fearless duck later in life. It was her way of saying, “Keep going. Keep growing our flowers.”
So, I did.
Creative Writing In College
My Wattpad stories came to amass more than six million reads, reaching readers in many countries. The numbers are still climbing because I haven’t had the heart to delete my old account. Even though the stories no longer serve me, they continue to serve others. I still receive comments about how much someone from Great Britain loved Chapter 28, or how happy someone from China is that I continued the book for as long as I did. I still get notified of likes and follows, though Wattpad hasn’t seen a word from me in years.
These stories, stories I thought no one would bother with, are still reaching people. They’ve taken on a life of their own and are spreading sunshine in worlds beyond me. It makes me feel worthwhile, like I might actually have something to offer.
Though they may never know it, those kindergartners and Wattpad readers urged me to pursue Creative Writing as a career with no backup plan. Not a hobby and not a risk. A career. My career.
I went to college and proudly factored it into my studies, though it ended up being a minor in my overpacked degree. I branched out to multiple forms of entertainment and signed up for the film, acting, and writing programs. A trinity of creative freedom. Permission to indulge in my own expansive passion.
It was incredible to regard my work with this caliber of seriousness. I wasn’t scribbling in a notebook or tapping away at my keyboard at three in the morning anymore. I was writing to be read, making films to be watched, and acting to be seen. My professors were uplifting and instructive at the same time. They treated my assignments with care but also with constructive criticism designed to help me improve.
I became an artist. Not quietly. Not cautiously. Not behind ambiguous usernames. I was encouraged to be myself with explosive vigor and wear my passion like a badge of honor. I learned that the key to success is not being productive or practical but being authentic, honest, and in love with the craft. It made me feel closer than ever to the girl I’d been back in second grade, the shouts of our rigid society now whispers carried off by wind.
Creative Writing As A Career
Turning one’s art into one’s career can be tricky. In society today, we are encouraged to monetize everything we do. We are living in an era of freedom but also in an era of desperation. Folks can’t pick up a hobby without considering how much money they might be able to make off of it. This terrified me, to say the least.
Deep down, I’d always planned to pursue the arts on a grander scale, but tethering my creativity to my bank account wasn’t easy. At first, it turned me into an unrecognizable creature obsessed with productivity. I started watching my word count with eyes like a hawk. If I couldn’t reach two thousand words a day, I was a failure, a fraud, unfit for the demands of the industry. If my stories were not perfect for the literary market, they were unworthy drabble to be shunned and banished.
My stories, once brimming with light and bursting with love, became stale, cookie-cutter husks of their former selves. Somehow, the rules and regulations of the world found me. Somehow, the mold caught up, and my dreadfully adult skin was pulled taut over my bones again. After two attempts to write two separate novels, each outlined to reach borderline scientific levels of marketable perfection, I gave up. I decided that I wasn’t meant to be an author. I broke up with writing.
My days were filled with whatever I could find to fill them. After a few months without my midnight musings and interstellar adventures, however, a hollowness took root in my heart. I was missing something, and missing from something. Characters beyond the veil were calling out to me as though I were a friend trapped in a faraway realm. They reached for me, their fingers flexed to capacity. They screamed in the void, waiting to be heard, hoping their voices would find me. One fateful, Autumnal morning, they did.
I started writing like I had before the enigmatic economy found me. I started writing, not like an adult, but like a child. I felt like I was back in my bedroom, only eight or nine years old, playing with dolls. These “dolls” were incorporeal, maneuvered by keyboard clicks instead of plastic limbs, but they were there. I didn’t just play with them, because I was a part of the game.
After a creative drought that lasted far too long, I found myself running to my laptop again. Each morning, I awoke bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and excited to reunite with my cast. Each night, I had to pry myself away from the adventure, hoping to inhabit dreams that would continue it after falling asleep. This was not a story written for an audience. It was a story written for me. You can imagine my surprise when it was this story that connected me with my literary agent.
I sent it out to the query trenches with an open and hopeful heart. After completing the adventure and enjoying it to its fullest on my own, my thoughts meandered back to Wattpad, to the people who found my fan fictions when they needed some extra sunshine. I couldn’t imagine my words touching anyone’s life, but for some reason, they did. For some reason, my silly little ninja turtle and superhero tales did.
Perhaps my original story could do the same. It saved my life during one of the most difficult experiences I’ve ever faced. If there was even a chance it could help someone else, I wanted to take it. So, I sent it out, and only a few months later, received a full manuscript request. That request blossomed into an offer call, and on that call, my agent made every puzzle piece click into place. She spoke about my story in a way that made me feel limitless, and when I placed my swooping signature at the bottom of our contract, my world started glowing differently.
Your Inner Child Is The Artist
I wanted to share my story because, looking back on it, I see that a common theme has connected each stage of my writing journey like a golden thread. I feel like a lot of writers are familiar with it.
Whenever I let the world douse my fires with doubt, expectations, and fear, every dream in my heart felt impossible. When I closed the shutters and sat with my own sunlight, blossoms of creativity bloomed.
In order to become who I needed to be, I had to leave behind what others wanted me to be. I couldn’t be the diligent planner of backup careers. I couldn’t be the author of just any book. I had to be my own kind of artist to create what I was meant to create. That artist knew who she was back in second grade, and healing has been less about transforming, and more about digging through the rubble of adulthood to free my inner child.
When I write, I write with her hands.
Our inner children do not care about money, fame, or any caliber of success. They do not trouble themselves with metrics and graphs. They don’t have enough time in their schedules, busied by fun, to be burdened with silly grown-up stuff. All they want to do is play, and when we write, we play. Our inner children know we can be rockstars, astronauts, and international bestsellers. They bind their books with colorful string, eager and proud to share with whoever will listen, whoever might need to be told a good story. They are not afraid of judgement or criticism because they live for the sake of living. They create for the sake of creating. They exist in a state of eternal play, in a realm where nothing is too serious.
It was my inner child who helped me write my first real novel. She wanted to go on an adventure, to play with cosmic friends from light years away. She hit that Send button on Query Manager, because it was time for an authorly adventure here on Planet Earth. She infused me with her fearlessness, and believed in us every step of the way.
We never truly grow up, especially as writers. We are forever caught in games of play-pretend on paper; daydreamers paid to log our exploration of imagination. Coming back to writing has meant coming home to me, the real me. Staying true to my dreams keeps us together, no matter what.
I truly hope this piece inspires you to reach out to your own inner child and perhaps give them some time to shine during your next writing session. Little Brittany is the daring dreamer with all the ideas, so I can attest to the value of letting your Little Self speak. Happy writing, and never forget that when you make yourself happy, you can’t help but spread that happiness to others. ♡
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