About

Hello, everyone!

       My name is Dani and let me welcome you to my little corner of the Internet also known as The Smiling Pen!

            You know, in case you hadn’t already figured that out from the URL and the logo up in the corner and all that.

            Lame attempts at humor aside, let me tell you a little bit about myself and why I started this blog.

            For as long as I can remember, I’ve been surrounded by magic. My sister and I grew up playing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Super Mario 64 and we shared a set of The Magic Tree House, comparing ourselves to Jack and Annie. When I was seven or eight, she sat me down on the couch and read me the first chapter of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and I was immediately hooked.

            It’s pretty safe to say that reading and diving into these fictional worlds was second nature for me.

            Writing, on the other hand, was not.

            I had no real interest in writing when I was younger, despite how connected it was to reading. Maybe it’s because I was just so bad at it. Anything I wrote for school was either flat and dull or it was full of bizarre twists and turns that there was no real plot. All the details I tried to include spiraled out of control until my tangents had tangents.

            But when I was about 13, I had a sudden idea to take the world and story of Twilight Princess and turn it into a novel. It seemed perfect. I had characters, dialogue, and a set plot to keep me on track. All I had to do was fill in the details.

            Spoiler alert: it wasn’t very good.

            And all the fanfictions I came up with during my high school years were even worse. I never finished any of them. 

            I could get into all the nasty details about how awkward and illogical those stories came out to be, but that’s not really what I want to tell you about. What I meant to say with my introduction is a lesson I didn’t learn until I was out of college.

            You can’t teach someone how to write.

            Don’t get me wrong – I loved my creative writing classes and they gave me opportunities to practice different exercises and hear what styles and tones my classmates worked with. I’ve created some stories in those classes that I am very proud of.

            But when I did the assigned reading out of my thick yellow textbook, I felt this vaguely formed frustration because textbooks can teach you the technicalities of grammar and the hallmarks of the different points of view, but they can’t teach you how to write.

            I’ve heard a lot of advice over the years and I’m sure you have too, stuff like ‘write for fifteen minutes every day’ or ‘write a full first draft, then edit.’ Those don’t work for me. I don’t have many stories physically written down and completed because I’m a perfectionist. I plan and brainstorm and can picture scenes in my head like movies, but finding the right words isn’t easy. But am I a bad writer because the advice doesn’t work for me? No.

            I’m just different.

            And maybe you are too.

            Some of my posts start with the phrase ‘How to…’ but I don’t mean for this to be a teaching blog. Artists need constant, lifelong practice, so I can’t pretend like I can make you a master of the written word.

            That’s all up to you.

            I just want to share my story in the hopes that perhaps what worked for me can work for someone else.

            Plus, I am really happy to have a place where I can share theories, headcanons, missing scenes, closer looks, etc. about my fandoms! I’ve yet to meet a writer who hasn’t fallen in love with another fictional world, so I hope these ‘fandom fillers’ can deepen your appreciation for the movies/games/shows/books you love just like they did mine!

            Good luck, and happy storytelling!