It was December and I'd just posted a message to my entire fan base saying that I would be returning to writing on March 16th 2013, with 'Sinister twin sister 3' and 'The star'. It's now apparent that I had posted the message without any prior thought or self deliberation because less than three weeks later, I posted another message announcing my departure from Wattpad, which I plan for 2014.
I've been on Wattpad since June 9th 2011, and since day one I've gotten nothing but immense amounts of love and support from you, my Hill-Headz, and while I'm forever grateful for my fans and my followings, I must admit that Wattpad has thrown off my entire sense of reason, meaning I've some how lost the main goal, the reason why I STARTED writing books in the first place.
Allow me to elaborate. I was always a writer, ALWAYS, though I never really considered myself to be an 'author'. Some of you may look at these two words as the same thing, and by definition they are, but in MY mind there's a huge distinction between the two. In MY mind, an author is someone who dedicates their personal and sometimes professional time to penning stories (both fiction and nonfiction) in specific, while a writer is one who can write damn near anything (stories, poems, songs, short stories, articles, scripts, music, etc). So to put it in layman's terms, an author is one who just writes books, while a writer is one who writes everything.
I have a story, follow it because I promise it has relevance to the issue... I first discovered my knack for writing in the first grade. I had a teacher named Mrs. Wilson who would give the class thirty minutes a day to creatively write what ever it was that we wanted to write, and when the thirty minutes were over, we each had to stand and, one by one, read to the entire class what it was that we had written. At the time, I was really into children's detective books, I had this huge obsession with detectives and I even wanted to be one. Some of my favorites were 'The bailey school kid books', 'The boxcar children books', and the 'Nate the great books' were my ABSOLUTE favorite. Even back then at that age I understood how to use other peoples' works as inspiration without actually copying them, and without forgetting my own originality. With the thirty minutes given, I created my own detective series of short stories that were about new mysteries each day, but that kept it's main character, which happened to be me. So for example, one day it would be 'Detective Jaylen and the mystery of the half eaten jello', then the next day it would be 'Detective Jaylen and the missing piggy bank', and so on and so forth. My classmates and even my teacher found my stories to be so hilarious and entertaining, that they would almost look forward to when it was my turn to read aloud, and some of my classmates would even ask if I could write them into the next story. I've been writing ever since.
It wasn't a big deal to me back then though, because I thought that everyone could write as I could, it didn't really dawn on me that it was a 'gift' until much later in life. My writing abilities increased dramatically with age, it seemed like the older I got, the better I was able to write, the more I was able to write, the more I WANTED to write. It became a passion, and I loved doing it. What started out as short stories eventually grew into long stories, and lyrics to songs, and movie scripts, and poems, and I would write all of this stuff just purely out of boredom and because I loved doing it. Even though I had become extremely popular in high school, I was still sort of a nerd because I was really smart, and the other popular students realized how good I was with words and at writing, and eventually started to pay me to write essay's for them since I was now apart of their inner circle. I charged thirty dollars per paper, which me and some of the friends of whom I've kept from high school still laugh about to this day.
I began writing my first full length novel when I was seventeen years old, and even though I never finished it, I still have some of it's pages. It was a novel that I would eventually give the name 'Dangerous' to, about a modern day Bonnie and Clyde like couple who rob banks for cash and take lives for the hell of it. I stopped writing this book because, simply put, I lost the inspiration for it. The next novel that I attempted to write was called 'Club kids', a book that was loosely based off of the trends of the time, the Paris Hilton's and the Nicole Richie's, a book about a group of rich socialite friends who attend tons of parties and take loads of drugs, but after writing the first few chapters I felt it sounded a little cliche and so I stopped writing that one as well. The book that I started writing after 'Club kids' would be one that I was extremely proud of, and one that I almost finished. It was called 'Phoenix rising' and it was sort of like the Sinister series but not quite. It was about a girl named Phoenix who found out that she's a witch and that her boyfriend is a shape-shifting gargoyle who mostly lives his life as a human, (their relationship was way more exciting and complicated than that but I have to move on to the point) well anyway, the point is this... I've been writing since forever, and it's always been because I genuinely just Love to write. I love escaping in my imagination and being able to translate the things that I see into words. I started writing the projects that I named earlier, because I loved writing and I just wanted to write. Writing has never been a competition for me, it's just been something that I loved to do, it's never been for comments or votes or fans... UNTIL now.
People weren't reading my stuff before I joined Wattpad, so it wasn't about votes and fans, it was just enjoyment. I feel like since I've joined Wattpad, I've completely lost the reason that I started writing in the first place. I find myself overlooking my love for it, and reaching past that love in order to grab more votes, more fans, more comments, etc. It hasn't really been enjoyable for me anymore because I feel as though I'm in constant competition with myself, because I'm trying to out do what I've done in previous chapters instead of letting my imagination run free and living the story out in my head like how real writers are supposed to do, and until my love for my skill returns I have to seclude myself for a while. Now just because I'm retiring, don't think that I may NEVER come back to Wattpad to write again because you never know what the future holds, (I might come out of retirement one day because apparently people can actually do that in real life) but I just have to take a minute to get my knack for it back. So don't really think of this move as a retirement even though that's what I'm calling it, just think of it as a business move that will eventually make me an even better writer, and while I'm away I'm going to try and get my works published. Who knows what could happen, the possibilities are endless.
Next upload will be 3/19/2013
