Creative Writer 

I have been writing since I was about 8 years old. At 11, a teacher pointed out that being an author was a career path, and since then, I've dreamt of doing it fulltime; in her class, I also accidentally won an award for my creative writing. It was 7th place, but it was out of the entire school district, and I honestly don't remember entering. 

In middle school, I learned to type just so I could write stories faster. My writing style has been refined in the last 20 or so years, and I have expanded my craft to short stories, novels, and even have entire book series in progress. 

I was lucky enough to dedicatedly study creative writing and popular fiction in college under Orson Scott Card.

 Poet 

I started mostly in middle school, rhyming fairly predictable rhymes and calling it poetry. But as I grew and studied more poetic forms, I found that I enjoy following poetic forms to express something unusual. 

In 2012, I wrote a Christmas poem that began a tradition of writing a more elaborate adventure every year, some years landing on the naughty list, others forging an alliance with Santa to defeat the Krampus. 

I have gotten several poems published, and can now write free verse or poetry with specific forms. 

Academic Writer 

Starting mostly in high school and continuing all throughout my undergraduate, I spent way too long writing essays. As a result, I can format quickly in MLA or Chicago style, I know what information is needed to cite sources, and can wrestle most word processing software into submission.

What I learned in college, however, was that essay writing can be very fun, when given the freedom to write about obscure or strange topics that I need all 2000 words to explain this minute connection between two seemingly unrelated concepts. My favorite essay to date is my senior thesis, 20 pages on John Ashbery's poem "Daffy Duck in Hollywood," where I argued that the message was actually about Daffy Duck's reaction to our world and how weird we are, with everyone trudging along to places like Disneyland with our fanny packs. 

Professional Writer

In college, under the assumption that I'd land in a mysterious "corporate job" at some point, I studied what this even meant. I began writing in a more concise and clear manner, eliminating purple prose and needless details from my writing. 

However, this had an odd effect on my the rest of my writing; my heavily-edited, concise words made writing 8 pages or 2000 words a little harder, and my creative writing teacher was concerned that my fiction writing was too minimalistic in descriptions. 

Journalist 

I was privileged to study under Jeff Benedict, who was convinced that I was wasted in fiction. He got me started in journalism, and I ended up working as an editor for several semesters for the school paper. I learned AP style and how to interview people, and later mentored journalists to learn the same.