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How organized that thought is.

I have always loved to write, I think. I would write research papers when I was younger just to have something to write about. It was always a lot of fun to me. I loved watching the words form and scroll across the screen as I typed them. I was watching myself create things. It was pretty okay.

I had wanted to be a writer when I was young. I was much more idealistic and full of optimism then. What a wonderful dream that would have been to hold on to.

I wrote stories long before I ever imagined making movies. I imagined things the same way back then, but instead of planning for cameras I planned for words. I wrote about all kinds of things. I wrote alone and I wrote jointly with friends. Most important to me, however, was that I wrote. I used to write a story every day at school. I would throw them away at the end of class. I wish I had kept them. That's okay.

I was never satisfied with my characters, though. They had names and descriptions, but they were still just ideas. They had histories, but they were still just shells. I plotted out each story meticulously. Every turn, every detail, and every development was laid out so that my writing would follow the plan exactly.

It never worked. Maybe that was why I threw all of those stories away.

After reading Stephen King's novel On Writing, I tried a new approach. I focused more on the characters than the details of the story. And I just wrote. I sketched the plot roughly and dropped the characters in. My writing became a sandbox and not a slide. When I realized that was how writing should be done, my characters became people. And I have no control over people. They write themselves.

How wonderful.

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