Learn from my Mistakes

Fellow writers, this post is written for you as a warning.

There are many ways to start a book, you can sit down and decide to tell a story, you can be inspired by something like a dream, another book (fan fiction), an event in your life or someone else's life and decide to write from that, you can also just free write and see what happens.

To be honest, I had no intent on writing Poison, and i certainly didn't think that I would get this serious about it... Here's the story of how Poison started...

I had lunch detention for ditching class. The detention teacher told me that I could either work on homework from another class or do the assignment on the board, I chose neither. Instead, I just sat down and started free writing a monologue.

I did one scene in Poison and thought that it was amazing. I named it, The Cult, and the next day (after proof reading) I showed my friends and they loved it. From that point, I rewrote the monologue, and added and eventually came up with a direction to take my story, but because I wasn't 100% sure of what I wanted, I ran into a few problems that I am paying for now.

1. I've switched between first and third person, so now it makes proofreading difficult and it causes me to take out some parts and then re-add them without the original effect

2. Now that the complete story is done and I know exactly where everthing is going, I have to eliminate the roads that started to lead somewhere, but never got there.

3. Symbolism and certain ideas are only shown is small parts. The ideas should be present through the whole book.

So now I have to pay attention to these things in addition to the norm. My advice to anyone who finds himself writing a book is, before you get too far, get your ideas straightened out and then start rewriting from the very beginning. I wish I would have. Luckily, I'm almost halfway done with the proofreading. Wish me luck.