My Life as An Author

For this first unit of Endurance, we learned about famous figures in history that've endured hardships, and looked at our own lives to see what we've endured throughout them. We also started reading Night by Elie Wiesel, which is a book about his experiences in a concentration camp during the Holocaust and how he endured it and survived to tell the tale. 

In this Action Project, we were tasked with writing our own autobiography from the future. Below is my autobiography.

I’ve always had a certain place in my heart, a certain passion for books. Something about being able to escape reality and come into this new world that the author of the book has woven for you just captivated me, and it still does to this day. Books have been a constant throughout all of my childhood. Even now, I find myself getting hooked on a series of fantasy books and can’t wait for the author to release the next volume. The feeling of excitement and joy when I find out that that one book I’ve been waiting for for a couple of months has been released will never get old.

I was born on May 22nd, 2003, to a family of two in Chicago, Illinois. I never moved around from the house I was born into, or was really independent from my parents for that matter, until I left for college. From the very beginning, I was a kid who loved reading. My parents would read to me every night until I was old enough to do it myself. I was their only child, unless you counted my dog Cowboy, which he certainly did. 

The driving force in my life has been my need to consume and create fiction. Books have been a constant throughout all of my childhood, drawing me in like a moth to a flame. Even now, I find myself getting hooked on a series of fantasy books and can’t wait for the author to release the next volume. I really end up drawing inspiration from fantasy stories, which are easily my favorite genre of books, and the wonderful worlds and characters and relationships and ideas authors are able to piece together.  

I remember back in second grade I refused to write out anything by hand, because of my deal with sensory issues and ADD. ADD is like ADHD, but minus the Hyperactivity. Basically, it makes it harder for me to concentrate on tasks, and I need to move around and keep my body engaged as well as my mind. Anyways, I forget what they called it, but I was too little to have my own computer, so they gave me this typing thing where you could only see like three lines of text on it, and it printed on the teacher’s printer. On tests, I’d even have scribes sometimes for tests back in the day, like if I had to write a paragraph or something I’d tell the person next to me what I wanted to write and they’d write it down. My problem isn’t having big ideas or not knowing the material or anything, it’s more about getting them onto actual paper, which is probably why my handwriting is really bad. And before you object and go, “Oh, surely it’s not that bad, Will, I’m sure it’s decent enough," you know it’s pretty bad when even you can’t read your own writing sometimes.

Dav Pilkey was one of my favorite authors growing up, not just because he made genuinely funny children's books, but also because he was like me; he struggled with ADHD throughout a lot of his early life, and it was eventually what pushed him into creating his Captain Underpants series as a kid.

Discovering Discord and starting to write with like-minded people was what truly ignited my passion for creation, after I had thought it was never quite for me for so long. Which eventually brought me into Dungeons and Dragons, another more recognizable form of collaborative storytelling. I think that this period, that I discovered in my first year of high school, has really helped me discover something that I never really knew I would’ve loved before. 

In fact, I got so sucked into this world of writing and creation that I often ended up spending too much time writing with friends instead of actually focusing on classes or on homework over the course of my high school career. This resulted in my grades dropping and causing me to miss some assignments, catching the attention of my parents and my teachers. That caused me to dial back my time spent writing more and to prioritize homework over having fun writing with friends.

The most difficult time in my life, and perhaps the biggest hurdle to my success and happiness was when I hit a major writer’s block, where I could barely have the motivation to get anything done, let alone write.

I wasn’t ready to be an adult, to make my own choices, especially not financially. And, in college, I knew they have a lot of programs in place to help you there, and I can still talk to my parents and all, but it’s still a pretty big leap forward. It was like the gap between middle school and high school, except it felt much bigger because I was actually going to have to manage a lot of it myself. And was really scary, at the time. I had been kind of taken care of all my life, and now I’m going to get thrown out into the world to learn for myself, and I wasn’t sure if I was ready for that.

The next major hurdle I faced was trying to get my feet off the ground as an amateur writer looking to go into the business of tabletop roleplaying games, specifically. Writing and publishing a book or a story is an accomplishment few achieve, and it’s a lot of work to get to that final point. 

Writing and Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) don’t get along very well. Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder is a terrible name for what it really entails, frankly. I am the least “hyperactive” person I know. It’s actually an executive function disorder, which affects not just attention, but also memory, motivation, organizational skills — to name a few. In my personal experience, writing with ADD involves a lot of starts and stops. Sometimes the words just flow, but other times the ideas are there in my head, but I can’t work through them in a way that makes sense. I don’t know what to put where or whether an idea fits. As I try to hold those thoughts in my head, I have to work extra hard to tune out other distractions, which takes a good deal of mental energy. By the end of writing for a long period of time, I am usually mentally exhausted.

My choice to work hard on fixing my issues earlier in my life with procrastination and delaying working on something until the last moment, and dealing with stress in a more healthy manner, eventually lead to my success as a writer. Looking at myself now, I’m happy to have achieved what I wanted. 

Now that I’ve published my first novel and some other fictional works, I can look back and understand how my ADHD mind shaped my fiction writing. Being transported into another reality through the power of the written word formed the foundation for my aspiration. An author can use words in such a way that they close out the world and silence distractions. Literature can also inspire change. It can be a call to action.   

I’m interested in exploring how storytelling has the ability to affect change, and to investigate the ways literature can affect wicked problems or social justices. Books allow the reader to be inspired. My purpose is to transform my inspiration into civic action. To use the power of the pen, to act on the change I want to see in the world.


In conclusion, I thought that this Action Project was a really tough one to get done. My motivation during these last few weeks of school has been pretty rock-bottom.