Origin Story
by Daniel Stallings, East Sierra Branch
How did you start writing? A question many of us will probably face as we continue to write. It might seem a difficult question for those of us, like me, where the craft of writing feels embedded in our spirits. One day, we took up a pen and started to write. And we couldn’t stop. From the way my mother tells it, I wanted to create books since I was a toddler and stole reams of copy paper to staple together into started—but never finished—books.
A far more interesting question could be “What did you start writing?” What media drew you in first, tantalizing you with the chance to invent worlds and create content? What was your first crack as a wordsmith? Did you start with something intimate and personal like letters or journal entries? Or did you attempt to take a big bite out of the Great American Novel straight out of the gate? There’s no shame here; Each attempt is valid on the journey to finding your voice as a writer. And it felt fitting that, during National Poetry Month, I wanted to talk about my origin story as a writer. I was a poet.
Some Ridge Writers may remember the gawky teenager who toddled into a meeting about How to Write a Mystery many moons ago. I started writing mystery books a scant one year earlier at the time, at the age of fifteen. I had experimented as a playwright too. But my writing journey began before that. At the age of fourteen, I started writing poetry. My first writing success I can remember was when my eighth-grade English teacher, Mrs. Edwards, submitted a poem of mine into a national contest. It wasn’t extremely good in retrospect—a series of rhyming couplets about a kid’s first day in school where everything goes wrong and at the end of the day, he’s excited to go back to school! I do love a twist ending. However, it was one of the winners, and I got published in a national anthology of young poets. That’s when the writing bug bit hard. From there, I wrote more poetry, got a poem published in the high school magazine, made my own poetry collection in a paper folder for my friends, won the Ridge Writers Allison Aubin scholarship, self-published my first poetry collection, joined Ridge Writers and became its president, won the Jack London Award, published my first mystery novel…the saga continues. All because of a little poem about a kid’s first day at school.
“Origin Story” first appeared in Writers of the Purple Sage,
newsletter of Ridge Writers, CWC’s East Sierra Branch.