Ben Wiggins: A History of Writing

As a young boy, I was raised in an upbringing with a heavy emphasis on books.   Reading engaged my imagination, cultivating it, until I found it bursting forth and magnifying my life.   As a child, I would often play make believe with friends and siblings.   As I grew up however, I found I needed another outlet for my imagination.   Since my imagination started from reading, I felt that writing would be a great way to give back.

            It started small; I created picture books and comics about superheroes I made up.   I would write complex stories for English classes that always fell flat at the end, as I would find myself reaching the deadline and maximum number of pages.   My English classes started falling flat.   I could not understand why we would rehash classics and hypothesize what the inner meaning of the writing was.   Being a self-acclaimed author myself, I often thought that the reason those authors wrote those stories were simply for the sake of the story.

            However when I reached the age of sixteen I started to understand why some truly expressed themselves and the freedom that writing gave them.   I worked at a summer camp; I lived there, worked there, ate there, and got to know my coworkers like family.   So when an accident happened, and a close friend of mine died in front of my eyes, I found myself in dire need of an outlet.   I wrote.   I wrote for years about his life and the impact it had on mine.   When I finished, while it might have been personal and short, I self-published it under the title No Matter How Small and ordered a plethora of copies to hand out to his family and coworkers who knew him as well as I did.

            Now writing is my passion.   Be it a screenplay or a novel or a comic, I have started many.   I have finished only few, but there is time yet.   There are stories still.