Sacredness of the Ordinary

My item that I have chosen is my binder of stories. To other people it may seem like a random binder of papers but to me it's so much more.

I started writing when I was in sixth grade. I don't mean essays for class; I mean I started writing creatively. It was something that I was proud of and that I wanted to show off. Soon after I finished the first story, which was approximately forty pages, I realized that this was something I enjoyed. The story took me about a year because I got major writer’s block at some points.

I started on another story and my goal was fifty pages. I wanted to try to write more and to seventh grade me, fifty pages was a lot. For some reason, I loved to write war related stories. I never knew much about war but I knew violence very well. Watching action movies and playing video games taught me the concept of violence. I didn't like my stories being about ordinary life. I wanted to add supernatural events.

Anyway, my next story grew into something I never thought it would become. After a year, I was still writing it and my progress was rapid. I passed the fifty page mark. I didn't really have an outline for the book. I decided to just write and see where it took me.

It's been two years since I have started my second story and it has one hundred and eleven pages. Making it past one hundred was like a dream come true. I never thought in a million  years I would write something this long. I continue to write and hope I will finish it soon. It's still a work in progress and I hope to work on a better writing style in the future. Sometimes I feel like my stories aren't good enough but then I remember that no one has ever written a first book that was amazing. Every writer starts out with a draft.

The binder started to grow and from time to time I would read the stories in there and smile. I still can't believe I wrote those wonderful words. I was afraid to show this amazing new discovery to people. I was afraid they would hate it and I would give up on writing. Even today, I still haven’t shown anyone my writings. Sometimes I read my sister a quote from one of the stories but that’s it.

I wrote short stories only about two pages long and added them to the binder. The growing amount of stories in my binder made it special. I could physically see my progress. I also saw my progress when I started typing. I went back to type up the forty page story I wrote in  sixth to seventh grade and I noticed a lot of mistakes. I knew less about grammar and the proper way to write back then. I fixed what was wrong and I continued to learn.

I was happy with my writing but there was something that really weighed me down. It was all I thought about sometimes. What if I never publish? What if all those stories were for nothing? Then I remembered these stories were a part of me. It doesn't matter if nobody ever sees them. All the effort I put into writing made me a better reader and a better student.  Those stories represented my imagination down on paper and I will always cherish that. If I ever do publish, I will never forget where I started.