THIS IS WHAT I LEARNED ON MY QUEST TO WRITE THE PERFECT BOOK

 It all started with a deep and dying frustration of the things happening around me. Grades in class were slipping, performance in sports was going unrecognized, a break up due to problems with my mental health occurred and the begging urge to go for therapy was continually bubbling in my conscience. This was it. The time your life seems to be the summed up problems of the 21st Century. This ticking time bomb however, was recognized by those around me and not to myself. It went on for about 1 year and 8 months. Until that fateful day, I got my diagnosis from the hospital. The realities collapsed on me, like worlds and planets colliding in a science fiction movie. I finally took out my pen and notebook, and the first writing burst out with a stream of consciousness out of anger and confusion. However, this was the ash that the phoenix would rise from.

I started, my first story after the urges had built up inside me enough, to finish the ink on a new bought biro pen. What I understood about story that time, was I couldn't let the audience know what was going to happen next. All I wrote was continuous cliff hangers one after another, and making sure that each short piece was a build up to the next. I had fair enough good handle of the appeal to the sense, as per what the feedback I got from people, but the over the top descriptions got to me, and somewhat poor use of exposition to build scenes. I did build tension and sought to never let go until a satisfying resolution was built. Another thing was my story had no real purpose it was out of structure and no clear theme just pure and instinctive writing deep from the gut. 

From the experience, as I kept learning more about writing stories and trying get something out there, I kept learning more about the importance most of the fundamentals. My lack of knowledge and feeling of inadequacy plunged me to search the web. Like a pirate's quest for treasure, I had finally found the "X" on the map, from the free online courses handed out at Reedsy, a website that deals in the teaching of how to write stories. A whole new world opened up to me, exposing how much of storytelling I was a novice of. of story structure, character development, exposition, how to use dialogue to tell more about scenes or information to the reader, incorporation of theme, types of conflict, relatable characters, hooking opening lines and so much more that I still build from today. It made me learn that stories are told with structure, theme or lessons, conflict and characters that pull on people's heart strings at the most fundamental level and not the outlandish experiences of a random scenario. I'm glad to have a better perspective through it and wish to cultivate more books going ahead.