My passion for reading picked up a tremendous amount somewhere toward the middle of my high school years, and with this came my passion for writing.

These things go hand in hand, of course, because it was the reading that was inspiring me to write and cultivating my ideas on writing.

Last year I took Coach Owens’ creative writing course, and when I was assigned to write a short story, I began to ask the question What makes me like a book? Or more closely, What makes me like a story?

The answer to that question, if answered honestly, I thought would point me in a better direction with my stories and their relevancy and worth.

I thought about the emotions the stories made me feel, where these came from and the conflicts in the story. But all these things came back to one thing: the characters.

The characters--what they are feeling, their personalities and the way they interact with others. I can relate directly to this.

I am also a living person and interact with other people every day, appreciating their personalities, noticing their mannerisms.

I sort of discovered that for me to be a good writer (a writer that speaks truth in fiction, that stirs up emotion and thought), I must also be a good observer, and I must study and appreciate fully my interactions with other people.

This sort of thought pattern, in fact, made my life more interesting because instead of just looking at the people milling around me all the time, in and out of classrooms, driving next to me on the street, I saw them as characters with backgrounds and conflicts and unique personalities. 

Taking in these glimpses of people and their complexities began to make me feel differently about the world. I began to see every person as a story, and to think of all the stories that are walking around, interacting with each other. The depth of it all was starting to blow my mind.

I wasn’t sure what this all meant at first, whether this was something that I could directly apply to my writing, or if this new way of thinking was interesting but mostly a waste of time. I mean, how could I apply it to my writing anyways?

I could, of course, draw my characters entirely from real people, emulating their personalities and conflicts exactly.

I realize that this to a degree is limiting because I almost always want to change something about them or add something to them to make the story different, and this made me feel strange, changing a person and everything.

But this is the magic of writing, that these stories perhaps are not entirely possible, that the story you’re writing, among the billions of real life stories on this earth, is unique in itself, and not only that, it was planned out and written to be a piece of art.

I am no expert, of course, I’m just a high school student who enjoys reading and occasionally makes sad efforts at writing his own stories. But this to me was really fascinating--that writing stories was often simply translating real life experiences into artwork.

There are many stories that are larger than life and are impossible by reality’s standards, but even these are translations of the real world’s stories simply because they contain characters, and these characters must be sculpted from the interactions the writer has had with real people in his life.

This artistic translation of human experience from the writer and felt by the reader, perhaps, reveals a deep appreciation for human beauty inside all of us.