At the risk of sounding mean, I hate to burst your bubble, but I would be careful about this. Good writing isn't about expansive vocabulary. You can have the most extensive vocab in the world, and be a terrible writer. It's how you use that vocab. I was very much like you, but it just takes reading some of the stories on this site that can make you realise that you're not that good, and there are vast areas for improvement. I've improved just by reading what's been written by others here.
At 16...hmm. When was I 16? Seems so long ago, now. Ah, 2001. 10th grade. I wasn't doing a lot of writing just for fun, but I was in Honors English and doing a fair bit of writing for that. I was writing poems though. Some I still have. With some revision, they aren't that bad. Some were pretty dang terrible though. I wrote a couple short stories for class that got good grades, though I wouldn't consider them anything spectacular, now. I was very hung up on the fantasy genre and swords and sorcery back then. I remember I had started writing a book in middle school and kept working on it through high school. It was called "The Elves of Kyala Valley" and, while some portions may have been decent, overall it was very trite and superficial. I've kept it (written in about 5 composition books lol) and occasionally pull it out and chuckle over it. The plot is very predictable and there's a lot of deus ex machina used, disguised as magic. But it was a start.
I didn't start writing until 17, so not much. Though I didn't really have a clue on what I was doing, but I did manage about 45 pages.
Around that time, I wrote 50,000 words of my first novel. I lost the manuscript later, but it's a good thing I did. It was awful.
When I was sixteen I was in high school, where they taught us how to diagram sentences every single year. They also taught us Chaucer, Shakespeare and Beawulf, along with a handful of writings that predated the Civil War. The list for reading, and giving the token book report, was better, only fifty years old and more boring. I believe that the primary goal of teachers in high school was to make us all literary idiots and inform us that actual writing stopped happening a hundred years ago. This, of course, shows whenever we discuss writing topics because someone inevitably brings up some old hack, as if they are gods that couldn't possibly do wrong. So, in answer to the question, at sixteen I was totally convinced that reading and writing was terrifying work meant to make life miserable. Incidentally, I took English Literature as my lit credit in college, and the material was still not worth mentioning (the best of the lot was DH Lawrence. For some reason they didn't have Jane Austin in our 4000 page book.) It was at the age of 27, in an army day room, where I picked up a cheap western novel that I now know to have been terribly written (craftwise), and upon reading it I realized they actually do write books that are fun to read. Damn! Who'd have thunk it? After that, I started reading horror and sci-fi, ultimately moving on to fantasy, paranormal, and just any genre that seemed well written. Probably well into my 30s I came to the realization that good books have actually been written, almost all of them contemporary. In fact, over the years I have discovered that studying the classics is the fastest way to NOT LEARN a thing about the craft. Since they are also the fastest way to waste your time reading irrelevant plots for out current lives, I believe that my love for literature was delayed. Around age 40 I started to write, and I was terrible at it. First I wrote a million or so words of porn, got great at that, and even sold a few novels. Then I decided to turn 100% legitimate, writing a dozen or so really bad novels that I have never published and since lost (no problem there). Finally, at about fifty I started to read everything available about the craft of fiction writing, and that turned the page a ton. My ultimate discovery was to read everything available about the craft, write every single day, be in an active writer's group wherein you contribute every single week, and avoid anything written more than forty years ago. Thus, sixteen was a bust, in my case, thanks to sophomore English.
I'm not in a bubble. I literally said my prose being too verbose was one of my chief problems (plural), which should tell you I am aware my writing at the time had (and even now, has) much more than just one problem. Still, I've had many people affirm that my writing was well above average two years ago. You don't sound mean, just condescending.
Oh, this made me laugh. Either way I am very impressed you managed to get that far through a novel at such a young age.
At sixteen, I was just discovering that I could write coherent sentences at all, and use words to make a point. I'd written some bad poems and short stories before, but for the first time, I realized how powerful the written word can be for expressing what I was feeling. It was also the first year I kept a diary (which habit, alas, I dropped long ago).
When I was sixteen, in my high school English class our teacher in the creative writing unit gave us a month and a little bit to write a short story. Every day we would get chrome books and busily type away, and as the month progressed we would work in groups to edit, discuss and brainstorm. This is when I discovered my love for writing. At first I had trouble pinpointing the story I wanted to write, but eventually, I figured it out. English became my favourite class, and I spent hours outside of school working on my story. After the class was finished, I continued writing, adding and editing my story. Trying to work all the technical aspects I learned in class into other short stories I wrote for fun.
I knew very little about writing in itself. I thought having an impressive vocabulary was important and made me a good writer, when what I really needed wasn't an impressive words just the right word. That was over 12 years ago for me so it's hard to remember that far back. What I hadn't yet done was started learning my craft. I didn't take it seriously, I had no intention to do anything with it but I was a tad obsessive with this hobby. It was only at 15 when I wrote a creative piece for my G.C.S.E Coursework and the teacher made me do another piece because she thought I'd cheated and got someone else to write it, that I began to wonder if I should start being more serious with it. Then I just thought she was making a big deal out of nothing so it just remained a hobby and most likely always will.
Gosh, I think I joined this place when I was 16. I had a few 100-page drafts under my belt that eventually became a WIP I've currently shelved but intend to revisit. I've had that WIP for years, ever since I was 11, and only in the last month have I decided I need to rework it from the ground up after focusing on other projects for so long.
I was starting to consider writing as a potential career after two years of putting stuff on fanfiction.net. It was also a pretty miserable year for me and I had trouble finding the motivation to put effort into anything, so a lot of the story ideas I came up with are still just ideas. So for most part, I was at the same point I'm at now. A ton of ideas but lacking the focus and motivation to do a whole lot. I also started getting a lot more critical of myself now. I abandoned a Game of Thrones fanfic because I simply wasn't happy with what was already there, and for a few years I barely put up anything new (something which I'm trying to turn around now).
@16 I was starting stories that were assignments for English class and wagging the rest of the semester.
Also, @jannert I handwrite all my stuff to this day. This means I can write everywhere and when I then put it on my PC I have one guaranteed revision of everything
When I was 16 I was handed a metophoric shovel, maybe I should have clouted that careers advisor with it!
At 16, I was told by a few English teachers that I had some writing talent, but never did I actively work to improve my writing. I saw creative writing as mostly a hobby to do in between video games or whatever. Now, I see writing as an artistic form of expression that needs careful planning and cultivation.
I remember in English class, I wrote one short story that I got an A- for. The teacher told me that she couldn't find anything wrong with it but thought it wasn't fair to everyone else to give me an A.
I might try that. Now that I do have a computer. A first handwritten draft doesn't have to be quite so perfect, does it, if it's going to be transposed to a computer? That's where the chopping and changing will take place. Good challenge. And I do love notebooks and pens, to be honest. I might get more work done if I loosen up my working methods, and maybe try writing a bit away from home.
I actually took a break from writing on my own around my 16th birthday and only picked it back up to do something besides bounce ideas around in the last couple months. That said, I'd like to think I was decent. I could knock out an essay before my classmates had even read the articles yet. Put me at a keyboard, watch sparks fly. I'm told I have trouble citing sources, which is why I don't usually quote. My first attempt at a story, Jathan the Dragon Rider, when I was somewhere between 8 and 12 was cringeworthy. Looking back, I have no idea what I was writing. I still struggle with turning a plot into a sequence of events and then into a story, but I'd like to think I've come a very long way. 17 now, btw
ooh! I might also add, when I was 15/16, my English teacher was really into creative writing, so he had us do a lot of creative work. One of which was to write a poem in the "language" of Shakespeare. I remember this assignment vividly because it was humiliating. I loved the assignment, and I loved my poem. I memorized it and when it came time to present it to the class, I got up there and couldnt get a word out. I'm a pretty mild stutterer, but it gets bad depending on stress level. I looked up at my classmates and my stress level went WAY up and i blocked on the first word (a block is when your vocal cords seize and you literally cant get out a sound, and forcing it out is so exhausting you go light headed). I ran out of the classroom crying. Thus began my anxiety of reading my work out loud in front of an audience. Had to read the first chapter of a story out loud in for one of my writing classes in college. before It even got my my turn, i started hyperventilating and ran out of the room and cried in the bathroom. yay 16.....
You've hit on something that has bothered me a lot ...and I have a BA in English and actually taught it for a short time (hated teaching, but that's beside the point.) Lots of classics are fantastic, but I think 'we' as a culture inflict them on students when they are way too young to appreciate them. I would much rather get students reading what they like to read, and get them into habit of reading for pleasure. Not only does reading produce a lifetime of pleasure, if people enjoy themselves doing it, but if people are going to go on to be writers (and they'll be motivated to do just that, if they love to read), they'll have picked up a lot of good grammar, spelling and sentence structure simply by osmosis. There is a LOT of excellent quality stuff out there by contemporary writers. I think we should be using that as the basis for teaching—at least through most of high school. Okay, the occasional rich classic could be used as well, but the idea that everything worth reading was produced over a hundred years ago is not actually accurate.
I remember a few books that we had to read in class, particularly Lord of the Flies and To Kill a Mockingbird. I hate LotF. I found it boring, and I didn't particularly understand the message, On the other hand, I absolutely loved TKaM. We had to take it in turns reading it out aloud in class (16 year olds reading to the class? Not so sure about the benefit of that), and after we got to about chapter 2, I took it home and finished it - then, of course, was incredibly bored during the rest of the reading sessions.
Thank god I skipped mainstream English classes and even AP. After 9th grade English (which was more on writing mechanics), I was accepted into the IB Program. I thoroughly enjoyed those books/stories. House of the Spirits, Things Fall Apart, Yellow Wallpaper, Nadine Gordimer, Flannery O'Connor. Other authors we read were Louise Erdrich, Toni Morrison, Zora Neal Hurston, a little bit of Hemingway's short stories. The 1 Shakespeare play we read was Othello. My husband, who was in AP English, read the classics hand had an experience similar to yours. He did not enjoy it at all. I was introduced to the classics in college and well behind while my classmates had already read them in high school (Scarlet Letter, Dracula, Huck Finn, Call of the Wild, Wuthering Heights, Great Gatsby etc.) I dont know why high school classes are so married to these books where there are other brilliant titles out there to teach.
You know what Mark Twain said about that: "The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between the lightning and the lightning bug."
