What Making a Novel Draft at 13 Taught Me About Writing
And how I’ve regained my love for writing during the quarantine
Writing has always had a place in my soul. Ever since I was a little kid, I read a ton of fantasy books voraciously (such as Harry Potter, Chronicles of Narnia, The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel, and The Neverending Story) and I dreamt about becoming a writer myself. So, when I was 13 years old, I did it: I opened a Microsoft Word tab, I began to type, and I ended up with a 200-or-so-page-long novel draft.
I had recently gone to Europe for the first time with my family, so I was inspired to let my imagination fly. I pictured a group of friends going to Paris and facing a lot of adventures out there. I remember I wrote a chapter where those kids were flying through Paris over an invisible carpet, I loved the fact that everything felt possible when writing. Mythical creatures, historic characters, the eternal charm of the City of Lights; I had let my amazement towards Europe and the imagination I had as a child flow into the pages of a novel I had put my heart in.
Of course, now that I’ve reread it, it is quite simple and a little unoriginal (naturally; I was only 13 when I wrote it). However, I know that it is a representation of how passionate and amazed by writing and, overall, life when I was a kid. Because of that, the story will forever have a place in my heart.
My dad managed to print the draft, and I still have it, crimped and dusty in a bookshelf in my room. However, my dream of publishing the novel never came to fruition. My dad is also a writer, so he said he would read it to figure out the grammar mistakes in it. I was so frustrated when I found out there were plenty. I still tried to correct them to improve my novel, because I was very passionate about it; not because I wanted it to be published and seen, but because it was a project of mine, and I had my heart deep into it.
Yet, puberty came and I faced some problems for the first time. I was bullied in school, I was failing math for the first time after only getting straight A’s, I was suddenly being ignored by people I thought of as friends, and I was arguing with my parents a lot. I was falling into my teenage years and, in the process, I lost the love of myself. I lost my love for life, for school, and, unfortunately, for writing, as well. I had submitted my novel to an editorial, but it got rejected. My dad eventually got busy with work as well, so the draft ended up buried among tons of paperwork lying on my dad’s desk and stained with the print of a coffee cup. It felt as if that kid who loved to read and write had left me; as if the place writing had in my soul had been emptied by a perpetual feeling of failure, confusion, and lack of imagination.
Years passed and I felt the same. I was still good at writing: I wrote a lot of poetry when I was in high school, I won an essay competition in my junior year, and I did best at subjects that had to do with literature and philosophy. However, I still struggled with Math, I couldn’t read a book as easily and passionately anymore, and I still made mistakes that made me feel like my life was going through a downward spiral. I grew up to worry about what others thought of me and I never got that joy I had when I was a kid back. I never felt 13 again. Not until the quarantine, at least.
Being stuck at home has made me reconnect to who I was 7 years ago. The noise and stress of the outside world have lowered down to the size of my laptop. As I have bonded more with my family, I have also felt pain about all the years that have gone by as I have lost myself. I have thought about all the words I could’ve said better, all the alcohol I could have spared, and all the people I could’ve treated more gently. I have wondered if that kid who used to read voraciously and write novels would be proud of who I am today. I felt the same way Lindsay Lohan must have felt from prison when thinking about that little girl who starred on The Parent Trap. All that growing up and the memory of all those mistakes brought me a lot of pain in this time of solitude. And the only thing I have been able to do about it is to write.
I’ve realized now why I have always been passionate about writing. It is the only way I know to keep my brain straight. I have been able to numb all my pain and turn it into a piece of art that I know will bring me some wisdom. Though I still struggle to speak in public and, overall, to verbalize what I think in most situations, I have always expressed myself better through the written word. I have remembered why I love writing: because anything feels possible and white paper will never judge what is going through my mind.
I have been writing more and more throughout these last two months, and when I do it, I finally feel 13 again. I feel like I’m going back to myself and that I’m going in the right direction. That is what writing means to me now: the activity where I feel like myself the most. What is more, I feel like writing is the closest way I can get to the truth: both about myself and the world around me. It is uncertain when the world will go back to normal, but when it does, I know I will have gained something from the crisis. I have gained my passion for writing back, and so, in the process, I have gained myself back.
