The official Coffee Community book for exclusive interviews and advice from Wattys winners, Wattpad Stars, Ambassadors and various upcoming authors and poets. Peak inside, we have cups of Ristretto too!
EvelynHail: I would not say one gets into writing. It's the writing that gets into us! *giggles*
The writing bug bites us and then the infection spreads like an unstoppable fever. Little do we know the urge to tell a story has settled within our mind till the end of times. I started out in an elementary school, as many people do. The first short story I had ever written sprang out from the desperate desire to make a change. My guinea pig, Gricko, had escaped to my neighbour's garden when I was 7. She had two cats. One of them grabbed Gricko and even though my neighbour tried to save him, she failed and the cat killed him. I was devastated. When we had to write a mini-essay titled "My Pet," I wrote a story about my guinea pig and how my neighbour actually did miraculously save him. How Gricko survived. Since my neighbour was afraid of rodents, I wrote that she handed him back to me over the fence, on a shovel, in order to avoid touching him.
I still remember the teacher reading the story in front of the parents at the parents' meeting and saying it was amazingly creative and imaginative. My writing creativity was actually sparked by the desire to change the reality around me. I fashioned a different reality, a safe harbour parallelverse, to annul Gricko's death. To imagine that he was still alive. It was a lie but a pleasurable lie. Just standing there, watching all the parents laugh upon hearing the scene of the guinea pig being handed to me on a shovel—I felt a bit better, even if it had never happened. I was happy to have made an entire room of listeners smile. Words spoken at proper time, in a proper way, can do anything. They are so powerful; they can move mountains. Writers' words do not only change the world for the writers, but for the readers, too. They alter readers' perceptions, readers' thoughts, make them feel and reflect their own lives. Those thoughts spur them to action and then we have the 'thy word be done' moment. The most rewarding moment in writer's life—when we sense someone was genuinely touched by our story and it lingers on their mind long after they had completed it.
RainerSalt: *still has his mouth open in awe of Evelyn's touching Gricko tale*
*closes it slowly*
Er...
When I was a kid, I also invented stories. They were 'head stories', tales never written, invented to entertain myself only. Invariably, they featured me as a hero. And, invariably, the hero won the day.
When I discovered Wattpad, decades later, I tried to write down one of them. And oh was it bad!
