Learning How to Fly
I don’t remember how it happened but one day I looked in the mirror to see a full set of braces and this glow on my face as I help tightly to my copy of Writing Magic by Gail Carson Levine. “Writing Stories that Fly,” the subtitle read, and when I began my first story I fully believed myself to be flying. I would spend lunch trying to get my friends to look up from their sandwiches to read the latest paragraphs of purple marker that I had scribbled in my mom’s old notebook. Some days I would get frustrated because I had built this vivid, supernatural world in my mind that was so clearly stuck there, the words I had written still worlds away from the scenes I could see so clearly when I closed my eyes. But I had fallen in love with literary worlds and fantasies, a love deeper than I understood as a kid. Ye I think I knew even from my first attempt at a novel that failed after 500 words, that if I kept prodding, pushing, ripping the words apart and putting them back together, that I could turn my worlds and fantasies into something concrete too, like all the others that kept me up past my bedtime turning pages by flashlight.