I, obviously, love to write.  I want to be an author.  One of the greatest feelings in the world is when you write the perfect sentence.  Through writing, I have the power to create worlds, bring life, and put my imagination to use.

Unfortunately, people have drawn away from originality.  This means when you create something, anybody who reads it will point at your characters, your storyline, or even your setting and tell you, no matter how politely, that you have copied.  In the full truth of it, everybody except for the author of the first book has.  Heroes will have the same traits as other heroes, no matter how original they are.  If anything, the one trait they will share is immediate or eventual heroism.

What most people haven’t realized is that many of the most popular books copied some of the classics.  “Eragon” by Christopher Paolini and the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling have both drawn inspiration from “The Lord of the Rings.”  Being the obsessive person that I am, I lamented on this for days.  Now I realize that I can’t really blame them.  What little complete originality there is is snapped up before anybody can claim it and publish it.  I often find myself rewriting, because I can’t help but base my work off other things that I have seen or read.  It’s just that sometimes characters from movies would be perfect in one of your stories, especially under a different name.

There is also the subject of giving up.  Unfortunately, I find myself doing this all too often.  I hate to scrap my ideas, but to me, the writing can be terrible and I cannot draw inspiration from it anymore.

My friends ask me what happens to my stories and I can only tell them that, “They got sick and died.”  It’s hard for me to not hate my own ideas, and the lack of originality in my stories supports the dislike.  I look at my writing, and I want to continue the story, but then I feel bad about it and I find that I cannot.  I need to try harder.

I’ve seen my friends fall prey to this negativity.  We have all started something we feel great about, and then a day later find that it’s got this issue or that issue.  My solution?  Keep on truckin’.  If you hate the story, write it anyway.  Make it short if you can’t continue, and give it a strong ending.  That way, when you dig up the file or notebook once again, you don’t have to view it as incomplete.  When a story is finished, it makes editing and rewriting so much easier.

I won’t be discouraged when I look at my second grade stories.  I will laugh because they are cute, and then I will reflect on how much I’ve improved since then.  I will encourage myself and anybody else who is writing anything, and I will use my imagination to find something to write a book about.