I always had a fondness for creating people and stories. I always had a slight talent for art, and even invested lots and lots of time developing this particular skill. It came as a great suprise that my desire to draw people and invent worlds for them to live in was not as fulfilling as I always wanted it to be.
For the life of me I could not figure it out.
I enjoyed drawing (painting), and had no trouble being glued to a paper for eight hours a day straight- but the desire never really stayed with me as I wished it would. What I always would do was to scribble down notes of my invented characters. And over time the notes had grown almost more than my drawings. Still I had no idea that it would mean anything beyond the laughs I got out of it.

I started out late, with literally everything. When I was twenty years old I started looking up books on screenplays. See, this is where my comicphase came along. Because even though I enjoyed painting a lot, I would always find myself doing a series of twenty or more pictures of the same motive. I wanted to tell a story rather than to just show one glimpse of it.

So I set my goal. I wanted to combine both, drawing and storytelling. And the only way I thought this would be possible was as a comicartist. And when I say comics, I mean deep (as deep as possible for a moron like me) stories, not Pokemon. I realized pretty early on that in order to do this I had to know the craft. That´s when I started searching the internet for books on screenplay.
I wanted to organize my thoguhts, my themse, discover what the heck a plot is and how it all works together.
It was a most interesting experience. I literally ate up everything I could get my hands into. And because I was so cought up, I didn´t even notice that unlike wih drawing, I had no trouble keeping this new fire alive for weeks and weeks.

Over the years, I grew even more interested in all things related to screenplay, movies, television and writrs in general. All in the believe that it would imporve my storystructure in my comics (which it did!).
I did not notice that I hardly even missed the drawing and painting, for to me, writing was always just a means end to draw my characters and stories the proper way.

See how blind I have been all ths time? I just could not see the forest before me.

I never realized that I only enjoyed drawing soo much because it empowered me to get all these ideas down in some way. Imaginig myself as anything even close to a writer was not only absurd, but it simply never even crossed my mind.
I was good at drawing, so of course I thought I SHOULD like drawing!

Only very late did I realize that just because you are slightly more gifted at certain things, it does not mean that they are right for you.

I enjoyed drawing the most when I could get a character down the way I saw him/her in my head. I was happiest when that happened (and it is still a great tool I use!). And only very lat did I realize that the one thing I really wanted was to tell a story. And because drawing was all I could do, I foolishly thoght it was the only way for me.

But it wasn´t!

Writing was. I have only discovered this a couple of months ago. What ultimately linked all my previous attempts was writing. It came easier than I expected, and it stayed.

Since I have thought that my career would be in art, I have decited to study something that would allow me to be able to provide this unsafe direction. I will have my degree in techniqual chemics (don´t ask) in two years, and I already have job offers that will provide over 1500 bucks a month and only 20 hours of work.
It was a pain, but since I was interested in chemics anyways, and because I really, REALLY wanted to have a profession that would allow for both, lots of freetime and enough money to go by, it was an investement well worth it.

Only the route did change along the way.

I wake up every morning (earlier than I ever thought possible for me) to write. But not books, not stories. I write about structure, about scenes, about plotpoints (which I have only really grasped this past week!!! And thanks to you I now really know that a hook is NOT a plot!) about questions and the need to have the reader engaged.

I write for three hours, then I take a walk, go out, watch a movie and go back to study chemics.

And it works, it really does.

Every evening when I go to bed, I spend two hours forming sentences in my head, creating scenes. And the fun thing is, it really works. The next morning (or even the next week) I am able to actually remember my words.

I don´t even know why I wrote all this down. I´ll stop here.

See, I still can´t call myself a writer. I am in the ‘ I want to be a writer’ phase. And I am happy with it.

Yes happy. I am a happy writer. I don´t feel the worlds hatred on me, and I don´t feel like crap. I am twentyfive years old and happy thinking about writing!

(And appart from my sister, I didn´t tell a soul about my true goals!)
(Be forgiving!! English is not my best language!)

I’ve been a fan and own all of your books, but I respectfully think it wasn’t Joseph Campbell who go it wrong, or Carl Jung who was his inspiration for the collective unconscious/archetypes theories. It is this “oneness” and innate impulse that leads to genuine heroism that inspires writers, not the other way around. It is reaction, BEYOND the thinking mind, often combined with an extraordinary physiological reaction (women lifting cars off children, etc).

The “stories” that lead to persecution and destruction inevitably come from lack of integrity/compassion and projections onto the world at large, and/or individuals within our microcosmic “world.” My very best to you!

@Larry
Integrity??? One hopes that we all have evolved over the years.

@Larry,
Thanks! This was a stunner. A master, indeed.