Creative Writing

I've always been a big reader of fiction. It feels natural that I would want to write stories as well. And I do want to.

My feeling at the start of 2026

I title this section like this because I feel my explanation here may change over the years.

I feel I'll always want to write creatively. And yet, it doesn't come easily to me. At least not yet. I have to work hard to come up with ideas, think through plot, and actually sit down and write the content of the story. I'm pretty sure this is normal. I just need to do it more, and I often don't. It's been the most important, and also most challenging, creative area for me that I've been wanting to pay more effort to in the last few years.

I made good progress in 2025. Actually outlined a story plot and started writing some of it ^[1]. Started developing a couple other ideas as well, that I'm excited about.

Essentially, I made enough progress that I could stop having the dreadful feeling that I am not putting any effort into this important area.

Hope to continue making more progress in 2026.

Okay but why creative writing

• It's fun to think through ideas and plots and what characters might go through.
• A way to share ideas, wisdom, experiences, with other people.

I'm sure I will expand the above list. I feel it to my core that creative writing is essential to me.

Ancient history (of my writing)

I'm pretty sure I had some school assignment when I was really young, maybe in kindergarten (or maybe earlier?), where I spoke a tiny story and my mom wrote what I said and I drew a picture for it.

At early elementary school age, I wrote a small collection of (very simplistic!) mini stories. Each story was only a couple pages long (again, very simplistic!). I wrote in big messy handwriting on lined paper and drew pictures related to the story with crayons or colored pencils. I even bound the pages in a piece of cardboard, to make it feel like a book. I think I've lost the original copy of this, though I have a document somewhere where I eventually typed up some of the stories.

Mid elementary school age, I did another simplistic bound story, called "Eight In One". This is one of my punched-in-the-gut losses. I don't know where the original is, if it still exists in this universe. Those stories were special to me. I would pay a demon some good money to retrieve it for me (but perhaps not sell my soul).

I also had a phase of world-building around this time (I will refer to this as the Boxish universe). I would come up with histories, geography, inventions, and civic organizations for this persistent fictional world. My co-conspirator was my friend who I spent a lot of time with in those days. She would also do some creative writing about characters and events in this world -- likely a huge inspiration for my continued interest in creative writing in general. I had a couple false starts at writing stories in the universe around this time (or maybe bleeding into middle school, too), but they never got past more than a couple pages.

Slightly more modern history (of my writing)

I don't recall doing much creative writing during high school. I was busy being a busy boy working too hard at academics^[2], though there was some poetry outflow (Poetry#The road to poetry) and a lot of personal journaling^[3].

Things change around 2020. The era of OneNote. I have a notebook in OneNote called "Writing", with many sub-sections - and I've continued using this notebook^[4], but the earliest pages are from July and December of 2020. Pandemic era. I sometimes feel like I was most creative during the pandemic. I was at home and had a lot of free time. Not much social life other than sporadic video calls with friends. Plenty of time to explore the woods outside my house, delve into creative interests like 3D sculpting (specifically: Appa), and apparently to write.

Again, I still wouldn't say writing has ever come naturally. It's not easy. But I know that I want to do it. So over the years, I have pushed myself to do it more. I can see myself getting better, but I really don't do it enough to see that much progress. But I know I need it. It feels like it should be an inevitable hobby of mine -- it's one of those things that I could see myself being sad about in the future^[5] if I never end up making big progress in.

The 2020 writings were actually the Boxish-inspired writings. I have five or so ideas for different plotlines, and a little bit (like a couple pages worth) of writing for each, but nothing really developed far. I would like to go back and work on some of these eventually. Part of me thinks I want to move on from this childhood-worldbuilding. But at the same time, a core part of the Boxish universe has always been the concept of crossing the divisions between worlds, similar to Inkheart^[6] and Alice in Wonderland, so it feels equally ripe to explore it from a more mature perspective. My younger self explored himself crossing the divisions between worlds, and my modern self can do the same.

I didn't make much headway post-pandemic during the rest of college. The next major milestone was post-graduation, living in NYC, when the ever-present (but sometimes latent) urge to creatively write found its way back into the front of mind (often triggered by me reading past writings -- another place where I have to thank my past self for being a continued inspiration) and I started doing some writing again.

Another source of inspiration -- over the years, I've been maintaining a note in Google Keep called writing ideas inspired by "write the book you want to read" (a piece of advice I've sometimes heard). Anytime I had a story idea I would throw it into the list. I created that list in July 2020 and over the years have slowly contributed to it. A couple of the story ideas I've explored lately have come from that list, or from other Keep notes that branched off from that list^[7].