The Time I Almost Gave Up On Writing

I wanted to just take a moment to talk about how close I came to giving up writing in 2012. I have posted this on TikTok, Ko-fi, YouTube and even LinkedIn because looking back, it was a really near thing. I almost gave up writing, and I don’t know who I’d have been without it.

I was in my final year of university, the stories I was writing and sharing – if that – weren’t getting reviews. The creative writing course I took was disheartening. I was creatively not in a good place.

Around this time, I was very into webseries. It was post TLBD and there was a wave of them on YT. Among them was Buffering, which was written – I think – by Curt Mega who I followed from Glee. (I did not watch Glee. I did enjoy the Warblers covers of songs. This is not important information.)

I think it was on Tumblr that Curt posted a creative challenge he called Story A Day. I told myself I would try and actually do one, see if writing still sparked joy. See if I still liked what I was doing.

It didn’t have to be perfect. It didn’t have to be long.

Just write.

So for the span of time this challenge went on, I did. I wrote. Some poems, some short snippets less than 500 words. Experimented with dialogue, did a lot more showing than telling.

I think I wrote three different fairytale retellings of less than 1k each, just for fun. Just for me.
And at the end of it all, I fell back in love with writing.

To think on it – Curt Mega is the reason I’m still writing today. My stories would not exist without that challenge, so this month I shared one of those stories edited only for a little formatting to show myself how far I’ve come.

I’ve rewritten a couple of these Story A Day works before, and looking back, some seem more like poetry than stories, but the one I shared on the fourth Saturday of October to Ko‑fi members is one almost 22 year old me wrote. For the first time, almost entirely unchanged.