When Thunder Strikes
Like any good story, I want to start from the beginning. Birth. I’m joking, of course! But, in all honesty, when I was about 12, I asked my dad, “What was the weather like when I was born?” What prompted this odd question, I can’t tell you; but of course, he answered:
“Well, when you were born, it was a late-night full of thunder and lightning.” At first, I thought of this as a negative thing…I mean, to be born in a storm! Not the kind of thing to associate with your birth. As I grew up though, I found being ‘a child born in the storm’ was kind of like a prophecy. It was saying I was a force to be reckoned with. And now that I think about it, perhaps that’s how all good things start: with a little bit of thunder and a little bit of lighting.
Ice Cream and Daydreams
Middle school and early high school…like ice cream, this was the sweet part: the part where I constantly had ideas flow out of me. I wrote short stories, but more often, I read a lot. And I mean A LOT. I learned about all these famous authors and aspired to be a part of their ranks. And so, over the next few years of my life, I started to write more and more.
Relentlessly, I worked on my writing and sprouted ideas I adore to this day. But like daydreams, not everything went as perfectly as I imagined.
The Fall of Leaves
MBCI’s Studio program has been making the dream of a career in writing very real, but it has also been highlighting all the challenges of that life, too. Most notably, I found that I struggle with the technical aspects of my writing. I never truly realized how poor my grammar is. I don’t lack in creativity, but I often lack the skills to execute my ideas in a grammatically flawless way. And so, as leaves fall and re-grow on trees, I need to re-grow my writing skill leaves.
Nowhere To Go But Up
The thing with all of this is that I keep getting up after each fall. Like Buster Moon says in the movie, Sing, “There’s nowhere to go but up.” I’ll take the advice in full, and even I hit rock bottom, I’ll continue to pick myself up. If that means, writing senselessly, editing every inch, and even getting denied a thousand times till someone takes my idea, so be it. Because when I become what I aspire to be, they are going to see I was the one who persevered.
xoxo L.H.