Catching You Up: Part 1

By M. C. Oliver

My writing journey began when I was very little. I would write down “Once upon a time” tales that usually only lasted a page or two. But it was a start. A seven-year-old start. 

I don’t have many memories from these stories except for one day. 

I was sitting on the floor of my room when I was eight years old. I kicked my legs and groaned. I had always started from when the character was born to the interesting part I wanted to write about but this time, I just didn’t feel like writing the whole backstory to this character. I just wanted to jump into the interesting part. 

That’s when I gasped in awe, turned around, and stared at my bookshelf. Why don’t I do just that? I thought. Every book I had ever read always started the story at the interesting part and worked the backstory in as the story went on. I sat eagerly upon the story, excited at the prospect of this new idea. As usual, I ditched it and in true M. C. fashion found it while cleaning my room one or two years later. 

I’m sure I remembered what the story was but it was never finished so I never knew what happened. The worst was when I found a story that said, “Once upon a time, a”. That was it. I left myself on a total cliffhanger and will forever wonder about the potential of that “Once upon a time story” and what it could have become. 

Four years later, I was in sixth grade. During English class, we were talking about commas. Fun, right? I don’t actually remember much from it except for a girl in my class. She mentioned something about writing stories on her computer. 

That was a whole new world to my eleven-or-twelve-year-old self. I decided to test out this “new” way of writing by writing down a story I had been chewing on every night. It was about my favorite avenger, Hawkeye. I wrote a three-page flash fiction. Although to me it was very long. I worked on this during the rest of sixth grade writing Another Story after Another Story. You may be surprised but I called this document Many Stories. It is the longest project I have ever created. 

At eighty-eight pages, the word count amounts to 38, 545 words. I was awestruck when I discovered it. It was filled with plagiarism and fanfiction that I have never allowed even my family to look at. But I grew because of it.