Happy To Be Here

[MDragonRider]

Hello, everyone!

The name I usually use on the Internet is MythicDragonRider, with the abbreviation 'Mythic', but I thought that would be a bit confusing considering what this place is called. So feel free to call me Lux, another one of my screen names which I had mostly forgotten existed.

I've been writing since I was 7. My primary school teacher had introduced me to the wonders of literature and I had immediately become obsessed with it. Recruiting one of my friends who was also obsessed with fantasy, I created as many stories as possible.
I was a bit ambitious and kept coming up with new novel ideas that I was somehow convinced I'd write a 9-book series for. While I'm still plagued by novel ideas every waking second, I'm fairly sure I have a bit more self-control now and my ideas are better, or at least I hope.

Ideas my younger self had were mostly set in a generic high fantasy world populated by dragons. I'm still obsessed with dragons, by the way. They included half-fairies who learned how to fly conveniently at the very moment they fell off their dragon, secret organisations with stupid names, and a high fantasy world inexplicably also mixed with sci-fi which seemed perfectly logical for little me.

I think the first actually reasonable idea I had involved a prince who snuck out the castle he wasn't allowed to leave as a bigger intrigue plot unravelled. It certainly wasn't revolutionary, but at least it was decent. I proceeded to have many, many more story ideas until I finally settled on the one I'm working on now, which is about a changeling travelling between modern-day Iceland and a mystifying fantasy otherworld. It still has lots of dragons.

I'm still fairly young (in my teens) so to be completely honest I'm not sure how good my writing actually is, at least in comparison to other writers. I have a few friends who are similarly interested in writing but I think I need an actual community to help me since I'm trying to focus on a singular idea now. I searched the Internet for a while but every place seemed to intimidate me, but I used to read the articles on here when I was younger and in general, the community seems more friendly, so here I am. Please be patient with me because I'm genuinely clueless about my actual quality of writing, at least in comparison to other writers.

Thanks for reading my introduction. It's wonderful to meet everyone on here!

 

[CupofJoe]

Hail and well met MDragonRider [aka Lux]
Good to have you here
Iceland...? Dragons...? More Dragons...? Yep you can stay
We all have to start somehwere. It's what we do after that, that counts...
This is a remarkable sane and polite part of the interweb, supportive and helpful.
Leap on in and enjoy.

 

[Michael K. Eidson]

I'm still fairly young (in my teens) so to be completely honest I'm not sure how good my writing actually is, at least in comparison to other writers. I have a few friends who are similarly interested in writing but I think I need an actual community to help me since I'm trying to focus on a singular idea now. I searched the Internet for a while but every place seemed to intimidate me, but I used to read the articles on here when I was younger and in general, the community seems more friendly, so here I am. Please be patient with me because I'm genuinely clueless about my actual quality of writing, at least in comparison to other writers.

Very cool that you're in your teens and focused on writing fantasy. Please, please, don't let anyone discourage you. If you have specific questions, I think people here will be more than willing to help, to tell you what worked for them, but always keep in mind that what worked for someone else might not work for you. If a piece of advice doesn't feel right for you, maybe you aren't looking at the answer in the right way, but if after much consideration it still doesn't feel right, it's better to go with what does feel right at the moment. You can always revisit any piece of advice later, after you have a better sense of what your unique vision is and how the advice will play with that. Glad to see you here, and looking forward to your posts!

 

[Nimue]

Please be patient with me because I'm genuinely clueless about my actual quality of writing, at least in comparison to other writers.

Hey there, Dragonrider! Goodness, I remember being right in your shoes. Of course you're worrying and wondering how good your writing is, but I'll let you in on something--it doesn't really matter. Your writing and storytelling is going to get so, so much better as you get older, not only through your teens and twenties but through the rest of your life. It can seem sometimes that you need to be a teen prodigy or else--man, I wanted to be published at sixteen, but thank god that wasn't the case. You are not locked in to how you write at fourteen, sixteen, eighteen, or twenty-four. Getting feedback is great, but it shouldn't be taken as a value judgment on "how good of a writer you are" as though that's some static trait you have. Even if people say your stuff is great, you'll still need to work hard and learn a ton. If people have criticism, that never means you should give up--it just gives you a path to improvement to consider.

Though encouragement and feedback is important, don't worry too much about how good the stuff you've written is. What matters is what you want to write, and how hard you work to get there.