MINTZ: My love for storytelling

When I was seven years old, I started writing my first book. I don’t even remember what it was about, but I do remember the “about the author” section that came at the end.

“Casey Mintz is a beautiful, blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl from Florida. She loves writing and hopes that someday she can get a dog.”

While I have become slightly more humble since then, I did eventually get a dog, and I do still love writing — obviously, considering I write these columns weekly.

But column writing was not my first love: storytelling was. And my life has been punctuated by the stories I’ve written about ever since I can remember.

They started off as being extremely juvenile, as you can imagine. Stories about falling in love, something I knew about only from the movies. A horror story called “Into the Nightmare Realm,” which went sadly unfinished because my family’s 2004 computer crashed. Songs written about a boy I had a crush on in fifth grade and poetry written about my middle school drama that seemed like the end of the world back then.

When I was much younger, notably in second grade, I used to lie. I’d make up ridiculous tales about being the princess of Japan (I’m a pale, blonde, Jewish girl from South Florida), being a witch who had to go to Halloweentown to fight the evil wizard (yes, like the Disney Channel Original Movie) or being pretty much anyone but myself.

My friends would listen in amazement as I wove details together and stitched them so tight they were believable. I made the ridiculous sound sublime. I could answer whatever questions they had because I’d spend my days thinking of background information, filling in the blanks. I convinced one friend so well that one day when I was absent from school, she requested that her mom call my mom to make sure I was okay and hadn’t been defeated by a malicious wizard. I was actually at the dentist.

I think that’s where my love for storytelling began: knowing I could convey a falsity so believably. Knowing I could affect people in such a way that they’d tell their mom to check on me, which probably earned an eye-roll and a sigh, was a great feeling. It was the first knowledge that I had a talent.

Throughout middle school, I was known as the girl who all the English teachers loved due to my penchant for devouring book after book and my straight perfect scores on every essay. My seventh and eighth grade English teacher (hi Mrs. Mayerchak) used to pride herself on saving 100 percent grades for only the best essays of the year. I savored each 100 percent-earning essay, always trying to earn more than my best friend at the time. By the end of the year, it became a game. In eighth grade one semester, my final English grade was a 101.3 percent, probably my proudest accomplishment to date.

The summer between ninth and tenth grade, I was hypomanic. Hypomania is characterized by manic energy, extremely high productivity and creativity and little need for sleep. So over those two months, I penned my first novel. It was over 1,000 pages. I also wrote the sequel, which clocked in at a little under 700 pages.

I’d send chapters as I wrote them to my best friend Hannah, and on the rare nights I didn’t write anything, she would harass me for more. We had starring roles in the book, a self-insert story about going on tour with our favorite band and falling in and out of love with various members. It was fan-fiction before I even knew what fan-fiction was.

I became addicted to the art of the story: creating characters, making a timeline, planning scenes, even feeding all that excess creativity by making a slideshow in iMovie that served as a sort-of trailer. Only Hannah and I were even reading this, but being able to produce hundreds of pages of punchy dialogue and description made me feel on top of the world.

Since that summer, the hunger for storytelling has never fully faded. I’m constantly planning out the next book-length story I’ll write — I’ve finished two since that summer and I hope to start another over Thanksgiving break. Storytelling is the aspect of writing I love most: it’s why my columns are so narrative — why I always must include a little about myself, even when writing about the news. It makes things personal, interesting, and adds (what I hope is) a spark to yet another rant about feminism or a scientific discovery about anorexia.

I can write as many columns as I want, but creating characters and seeing what situations I can put them in and get them out of is my first true love. I don’t know if I’ll ever be satisfied until you see a novel by me on the shelves at Barnes & Noble — a girl can dream, you know?