Up next in this parade of guest posts is Matt Hayes, a stellar young writer (and one of my younger stalkers), who I first met in person at LTUE 2012. I had the chance to read some of his work, and wow! If I had written that well at his age, I'd be a best seller by now, which looks promising for Matt's future. Take it away, buddy!
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Hi, guys! I’m Matt from Matt’s Writing Lair, filling in for
David while he’s on revision hiatus. Let us wish him luck.
For those of you who’ve stuck around David’s blog for a
while now, do you recall a certain post from February called “Start Now, Not Later”? David mentioned me in this post, along with my friend Jackson Porter.
It was a very inspiring post, one that touched Jackson and I alike, and gained
us each about five new followers on our blogs.
I want to take the opportunity to talk about that post. How
did we get to be writers at such a young age?
1) My parents read to me all the time as a kid, so,
naturally, I picked up on reading at a young age, even though I didn’t actually
read avidly until I was about 9. The first few books I picked up was the entire
Narnia set by C.S. Lewis, which was sort of the spark of my writing career.
2) The next book I picked up was The Lightning Thief by Rick
Riordan, and I absolutely loved it. I picked up the sequel almost immediately
after I finished reading it, and, while waiting for the third one, I read
Eragon by Christopher Paolini. These three books inspired me.
3) Before I knew it, I wrote a 20-page short story. I
researched writing and read about writing and watched videos about writing. I
practiced every day, not letting my counter-productivity get the better of me.
I wrote at least a sentence or two if that was all it took. I turned my short
story into 3 short novels, which became the genesis of my current novel.
This isn’t me boasting. It’s to show you that you can do it
just like I did, whether you’re 15 or 30 or 60. If you keep putting it off,
it’s not going to happen. If you’ve only got one life, make it awesome and do
what you really want to do.
My name is Matt Hayes. I’m 14, and I can say I did something
cool before I died. So can you, if you put your heart and soul into it. It
takes time, I know. I’ve been working on the same thing for almost six years
now. It doesn’t get any easier, but the more patience you have and the more
effort you put into it, the better you’ll feel when it’s all done.
I’m Matt, and, you can’t catch your dreams if you don’t go
after them, so what are you waiting for?