How I started writing

Growing up, I read everything I could get my hands on. I remember when I was in the 6th grade, one afternoon I had to take my books back to the public library and asked the librarian to help me find more books. She took me to the young adults section and handed me several books that I had already read. She seemed startled and reluctantly pointed me to adult mysteries. She told me to come back when I reached high school if I wanted to read romance. When I wasn’t reading I was watching movies. I don’t think a movie came to the theater that I didn’t see. I was so inspired by the characters as I watched them express themselves through gestures and dialogue and I sometimes would think of my favorite story characters and how they move or what they would say if they were on the screen .

One day, the students in my third grade class needed to become better readers and the stories we were reading seemed to lack “substance” so they all said. They hated those stories and complained about the books so badly that one evening I sat down and wrote them a story. I thought I could write a story, since I had read so much. Without formal classes or even reading about how to write, I wrote them a story. We discussed character (they identified some things that were not in the story) plot (they also helped me with that), setting, the main idea, details and they just wanted to continue talking about the poor boy who had lost his best friend. When I tried to go back to the stories that the curriculum provided, they told me again that they didn’t want to read those. So, I had to come up with more stories. Thus began my dabbling into the career of writing.

I continued to read, this time focusing on children’s chapter books and decided to take a class at night to learn how the writers did these things. I wanted to know how they came up with ideas, how to choose vocabulary, which I discovered was extremely important, and, how many pages would make a good story. After a while, I got brave and decided to take the techniques about writing for children that I was now learning and shape them into a story. I couldn’t believe that I had written a story and to me it seemed like a good one. But, writing one story wouldn’t make me a writer so, I wrote another story for children 3rd grade and above.

I love creating characters. Sometimes I see my characters as real people having real experiences. One day I found myself referring to a character in my second novel when I was conversing with a friend. When that happened, I realized that I wanted to try my hand at writing screen plays. Again, I bought books, took classes and went to Hollywood to several Selling to Hollywood conferences and to several screenwriting conferences in New York. There, I learned how to develop a good character, which I found is extremely important in screen writing. It also changed the way I see movies. I wrote five screen plays and sent the fifth one out, hoping for an option. I had mild success with it, and because of that, decided to add novel writing to my list. To date, I have written three novels and have also written several short stories. But I must continue to improve. In writing, there is always something to improve and you improve whether you want to or not as long as you’re writing.

-Judy Kelly