I can attribute my love for writing to being bored in class staring at a blank piece of notebook paper in middle school. I remember always wanting to fill the pages with words to create something that mattered and that other people enjoyed, and for the longest time I simply dreamt that it would be possible.

Putting into words how I felt or what I thought was difficult for me to do, so I stared at the page just hoping if I stared hard enough words would appear. They never would. So I began as any young writer would, I wrote terribly.

Poems, songs, and letters were my first dabbles in the art of writing, and my unchiseled skill was atrocious. To clarify, if writing were a diamond and my pen were a chisel to carve out a story, I wouldn’t have even made contact with said-diamond. But it’s all about progress, and the only way to improve is to keep writing.

Looking back now at the four-times-folded pieces of paper I wrote on in middle school, I can’t help but laugh. My poetry had no meter, rhyme, or any other essence of poetry. My vocabulary was lacking (which it still is; thank God for a thesaurus), my thought process was a tangled web as any pubescent boy’s would be.

Eventually I developed a love for composing poetry and only focused on that. My formula was exhaustingly constant, with either an ABAB or AABB rhyme scheme, but the older I became, the more I wrote, the more I branched out and the better writer I became.

Fast forward to junior year of high school. My best friend Alex Bumpers is a writer for the high school paper, The Rocket Times, and convinces me to apply. I became a member of the staff and expanded my writing horizons to an uninhabited place for my pen: journalism.

Journalism became my new-found style of writing, as I kept working harder and harder to develop my leads and story ideas and interviews. Senior year one of my profiles won best-in-state, and I continued to pursue Journalism by majoring in it at Samford University.

No matter how much I loved journalism, I still felt like that middle school kid staring at a blank sheet of paper. No matter how much I wrote that feeling never escaped me, and at times even consumed me to the point where I just wouldn’t write anything. Then I tried something new.

I started writing an account of the last summer with my two best friends, Garrett Phelps and Alex. One day I just sat at my desk in my dorm room and began typing away on my laptop, every time I glanced up the word count growing significantly. The work was full of weak verbs and an inconsistent plot, but that story that had been pent up inside of me longing for a page had finally come out. Right then I knew what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I want to be an author.

Since then I’ve finished one novel and stashed it until I forget all about it and can edit it with a critical eye. I’m working on my second novel, which is already exponentially better than the first, and I started this blog and a Facebook page.

This blog is for all of my scribblings to have a platform to come to life and hopefully be enjoyed by others as well. Thank you all for taking the time to read this and visiting my blog, it really means the world to me. There is no greater feeling than when others love your passion.

-Jackson C.