About Wendy

I am a writer.  I make up stories.  I put brain cells on paper.

I can remember writing some of my first stories as early as 3rd grade.  Very short ones, mind you, probably no longer than a few hundred words.  I wrote funny stories; whatever made me laugh, because I loved to be amused.  Laughter is the best therapy after all.  Even by the age of 8, I clearly needed therapy.  By the time I was in 10th grade, I started writing longer and more complex stories.

The first long story I wrote (probably 10,000 words) was after seeing the movie, “Young Guns II”.  I was 15 and I saw the movie a couple of months after my oldest brother had died in a car accident.  I had trouble reconciling that the young boy, Tommy, in the movie had died.  So I wrote a story about a young girl who found him and saved his life.  Looking back, it was my subconscious trying to save my brother.  I never finished the story.  No matter how you hope, some people can’t come back.

By 11^th grade, another idea came to me.  It was while walking the long path from the school’s parking lot to my first class that it whispered in my mind.  When I got to class, instead of listening to what my teacher was on about, I wrote the first 1300 words which would be the opening chapter.  Forty-seven thousand words later, I had completed a novel about a high school girl who was being physically abused by her boyfriend.  At the age of 17, I had my first completed novel.

That went unpublished.  And remains unpublished for the most part.   However, I knew at that moment my life would be dedicated to writing.  I was going to be a world-famous writer!  But, I didn’t have the focus.  I didn’t have the dedication.  And I let fear get in the way.

Over the years I experimented with other forms of writing, from poetry, to fan fiction, to short story writing and screenplay writing, and even though friends liked my works and told me I was a good writer, I wouldn’t allow myself to believe it. My writing was probably just a fluke.  It took going back to college (because I dropped out my first time around, like most artists do) and it took signing up for a writing class to take the edge off all of my history and archaeology classes to realize I actually have a talent for it.  My professor, John, approached me after my first work shop story and asked if I had considered majoring in Creative Writing.  I remember feeling a gush of adrenaline rush through my heart and mind.  It wasn’t a fluke after all.

Yet, I had invested so much time into my history and anthropology classes that I couldn’t just change.  But, I could change my minor.  And so I did.

But having a minor in Creative Writing still doesn’t make you a world-famous writer.  It takes work and dedication that non-writers can’t comprehend.

So, here I am, 5 years after completing my degree, and a rather unfortunate bout of MGM (muse gone missing) that I’ve returned to writing with a vengeance.  This is my journey to reach out to the short story world and publish roughly 20 short stories and a few poems. This is my mad experiment of mixing my love of history and literature.  This is my return to my first true passion: novel length writing.  This is my return to the art of words.

Wendy C. Williford