Skip to main content

Every story has a beginning

 

The clock had finished tolling out the hour, and I knew it might already be too late. But I had to try. I sprinted down the hall and out across the deserted ballroom. “He didn’t steal the money” I blurted out, ignoring the startled murmurs from the crowd.

You close the book, for once indulging your tired eyes. It’s 12 am and you’re bored. Your phone is charging in the corner of the room, which is probably why you picked up a book in the first place. Your 12-year-old self would be scandalized, you smile to yourself, but she would also be pretty amazed at the fact that you’re writing books now even if you’ve stopped reading them. Your eyes drift to the cover of the book resting on your lap, ‘Nancy Drew’. You’ve read this particular book before, more than once, but you find yourself enjoying it every single time you do. That’s just the magic of this series. The reason you started writing fiction. The reason you have a completed novel saved on your laptop and probably part of the reason you never stopped writing. At 9, you were obsessed with the series, binge reading all the books you could get your hands on. Nancy Drew was perfect, and you worshipped the ground she walked on or would have walked on if she existed. She was smart, strong, beautiful and could drive a fancy car. It was everything you wanted. You loved reading about her adventures in River Heights, her friends, her boyfriend, and her life in general, complete with solving mysteries and putting the bad guys away while still managing to be kind and sweet and likeable. You have since stopped striving to that level of perfection, but you still remember what it was like.

After reading nearly three fourth of the series, you decided to try your hand at creating your own Nancy Drew. I mean, how hard could it be? You wrote four pages, read through them, and decided you were terrible at this. The notebook was tossed into the darkest corner of your cupboard and forgotten while you continued reading. A year later, you switched over to the ‘Hardy Boys’ a similar series where instead of wanting to be like the main character, you started crushing on one of them (no prizes for guessing who). They were funnier and more sarcastic, and you loved it. You’re pretty sure they shaped a little part of your personality while also reigniting your desire to write a mystery series. You knew the four pages that you had written a year ago would never see the light of day but you didn’t have the heart to throw it away and so it was still lying there in some corner of your cupboard (some people might call you a hoarder, but those people are wrong. Maybe). You searched for it, read through it again and decided it could be improved upon. And you did improve it. Three years later, you completed it, it wasn’t as good as the current version, but it was a finished book. Some part of you was scared that it wasn’t good enough, some part of you was embarrassed at how childish and unstructured the story was but honestly, the biggest part of you was proud of yourself and you’re pretty sure Nancy Drew would be too.

 

 

(Excerpt at the beginning taken from ‘Nancy Drew: Girl Detective: Once upon a crime by Carolyn Keene)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Friends We Make Along The Way

Cleaning out your cupboard has always been one of your favorite activities. Not because you particularly like cleaning, but because you’re always bound to find some old dusty diary that you’d used and discarded years ago. For you, discarding something means shoving it onto one of three shelves and rediscovering it a year or two later. This particular diary falls into your hands five years after you’d put it away, and out of idle curiosity, you flip through the pages. There are at least six different types of handwriting in the diary, but none of them are yours. That’s when you realise this isn’t just an ordinary diary, it’s a culmination of ten years’ worth of friendships.    You barely remember the day you bought the colorful diary to school, but you do have a distinct memory of peering over your friend’s shoulder, trying to read what she’s scribbling inside. She glares at you, and you take a step back, giving her her privacy. Another friend takes out her packet of colored ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Pretty Is Pretty Enough

You’ve never considered yourself beautiful. Pretty maybe, if the lighting is just right and the angles are good, and your hair is being cooperative, and your clothes are falling on your body in a way that doesn’t make it obvious that you have never stepped foot inside a gym. It’s hard to consider yourself beautiful when your Instagram feed is filled with women who wake up looking like they’ve stepped off the page of a fashion magazine, and sometimes you wonder what you’d look like if you had the time, patience, money, and energy to present yourself so perfectly to the world. However, over the last year, you’ve noticed something unsettling. With more and more women speaking up about how much editing goes into a 30-second Instagram reel, your envy has changed into a distinct kind of sadness. Everyone’s not editing their flaws anymore; they’re editing themselves. They’re taking their perfectly normal human bodies and making them thinner, fairer, and spotless to fit a standard that was n...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Life You Build

Having a strong internal locus of control means believing events in your life are primarily the result of your own actions. It’s funny to think about how you didn’t even know what a locus of control was two months ago, and now it’s possibly one of the most important things in your life. You’ve had this image in your head for the longest time. You’re standing on the sidewalk on a crowded street with the wind blowing through your hair and the sound of traffic horns wreaking havoc on your eardrums, and you’re happy. Now, it’s a reality, and you’re not quite sure how you got here. You remember sending in the application and prepping for the exam. You don’t think you could ever forget that. The planners, the notes, the *cough* legally downloaded textbooks, the study techniques, the time blocks. You’d never studied this hard before and a part of you wondered whether this would even be worth it. After all, you were smart but you weren’t that smart, were you? Your fears were realised twent...
5 comments
Read more