the startling truth of my writing history

I'm not going to make you read this whole post to figure out what the title means so, favouring directness over mystery, the truth is:

I didn't always want to write stories, or at least, not fiction.

And this is interesting--to me--because I find that whenever writers are asked the classic clichéd question of when they started writing stories, the answer is usually as soon as they were old enough to wield a pen.

When I look back at my writing start, though, I was definitely writing at a young age but I wasn't creating stories of magical lands or dreaming of larger than life characters. The only stories I ever wrote were all about me. What I wrote was journals about myself, telling anecdotes of my life in my somewhat self important writing voice. Looking back, what I think is funny about my writing is how funny and clever I thought I was. Just the tone of my journals is enough to give you an idea of why I was writing, to capture my youth for future recollection. It was so self reverential that it's hilarious--or at least I think so.

A reoccurring theme in my journals was how I was looking forward to reading the entries in the future and smiling at how I used to be. But let's say, for arguments sake, that I didn't change. What if all I did was transfer to a different medium--blogging--and continue writing about myself and what I thought of the world? What if I still wonder what I'll think when I read these posts in the future? What if I'm still the number one person in my mind?

That wasn't much of any argument, more of a tangent, but there you go. Do people change?

I find it interesting to go back to my writing roots because it is abundantly apparent that I wasn't making things up. I even say now that I'm mostly not a creative person, writing-wise. I write what I know, set in places I've been with people I feel as if I've met. Okay, so maybe I imagine the characters and maybe not everything that happens in my novels has happened to me. That might get boring. Still, it's pretty obvious that I write stories about facets of me, or about things that I would like to happen to me, with my own personal reflections and insights and opinions and values and epiphanies weaved in. The journey's of my characters are things that I have gone through or am going through right now. I don't know how it's going to turn out for me. I'm not an adult reflecting back on my teen years and using that experience to fuel my writing. This is my present reality, completely legit.

Does that scare anyone else? Like, what happens when I'm not a teenager anymore? Do I still get to write Young Adult? Well, I mean, of course I do, but will it still have the same impact? Scary thoughts.

That's the truth, anyway. I wasn't writing short stories about unicorn fairy princesses or life in space or rabbits or cats or tiny people who live in shoeboxes as a kid. I was just writing about myself and my life. The first (mostly) fictitious story I wrote that wasn't a school assignment was my first novel for NaNoWriMo 2009.

Does anyone else think that's remarkable weird?