WRITING STAGE
When I was in second grade of junior high school (2000), I started writing my first story. It was a detective story, about a police officer’s daughter who disguises herself as a boy (I think?) and attends a special school (I think?) where the smartest students mysteriously disappear. There, she meets a teacher who is actually an undercover police officer.
I also have no idea where the idea came from or why a junior high school student would write a story like this. Haha… Because as an adult, if I wanted to write a novel about police or detectives, shouldn’t I have researched the procedures or at least checked the logic first? But hey… I was still a teenager at the time, I didn’t think about that, didn’t think I’d submit to a publisher, and didn’t even know how to write well. But you know what? Whatever, there is always first time for everything.
My writing used to be terrible. I’d write a super long paragraph on a single page. Yes, direct and indirect speech were all mixed up.
My deskmate, F, was my first reader, and she always asked for the next chapter of my story every day. At first, I just wrote it haphazardly, without even planning a plot for it, but because of F, I wrote the next chapter every night.
One day, I realized how bad my writing was. I opened famous fiction books and realized that they weren’t written that way. After that, I started improving my writing by observing the formatting of those fiction books.
I really appreciate F because she never made fun of how bad my writing was. She just read it, asking for more every day, and commenting on the characters she liked. After the story was finished, my other friends read it too. To this day, it’s still a mystery to me how they survived my writing. Haha…
When I was in high school, I mostly wrote short stories. I had a book filled with my short stories. Then, this book often changed hands and was borrowed to be read, even by juniors. I didn’t even understand how they could read my handwriting. Haha…
At that time, I started reading translated novels in the library, like Sidney Sheldon’s works, but my school library didn’t have many, as far as I remember only a few books. I was amazed by his writing style, there was a book whose title I forgot, but it was very interesting to me, because each chapter tells a different character’s POV, so I could understand each character’s point of view better.