Krista Ino

My mom instilled the love of reading early in my life, and I have a literal paper trail of “books” I wrote (stapled sheets of paper, illustrated with crayola markers), retelling my favorite stories. I unfortunately gifted these lovely creations to unsuspecting friends and family members, who didn’t have the heart to throw them away. I still occasionally get a picture from them saying, “Hey, remember when you gave me this?” If that is you, please feel free to toss it!

Thankfully, I eventually outgrew this copying phase, but my love of reading, character development, and storytelling continued to be nurtured with my next phase: theater. For some reason, I was convinced that I was going to become a famous actress. I was awful at acting and even worse at singing (sorry, musical theater); however, throughout middle and high school, I had the opportunity to write two plays, direct two productions, and choreograph one of them. I think I truly enjoyed making the story come to life rather than being onstage.

At some point in high school, I decided to write a novella. I don’t remember the exact time I began writing or even why. I never took any creative writing courses in high school. I was a decent academic writer, and I skated through previous English classes without any real effort. But my 12th-grade class was different. I had an intimidating senior English teacher who ran her class with military-like proficiency and order. The lessons were difficult, thought-provoking, polarizing, and CHALLENGING. Everyone who finished the class felt like they had survived. But I must have felt inspired by it, too, because after graduating, I asked her to give me feedback on my novella.

In hindsight, I’m amazed that I asked, and even more so that she agreed. The summer after graduation, I came to her house, and she went through my novel page by page, paragraph by paragraph. It was brutal. My story was nowhere near good, but after the painful session, she looked at me and said, “You know, I think there’s something here. Keep working on it.”

So I did. I worked on it for a few years, and it turned into a full novel. Sometime in college, I considered it complete and shelved it. I was proud of finishing it, but I didn’t plan to pursue publishing. It was a hobby, a project that I wanted to complete for me, nothing more.

I didn’t think about writing again until the pandemic. I was working in a job that required a lot of data entry, and I was bored. I needed a creative outlet, so while I did mind-numbing work, I began to flesh out an idea for a story. I would write to 50k words, and then scrap it. It wasn’t even that I didn’t like what I was writing, but I was trying to find a specific story. Over the next two years, the plot, the characters, and the setting changed several times. It wasn’t until I was working toward my master’s that I realized that I loved the process of writing. And when I finally finished my manuscript after my first year of teaching middle school English, I knew that this was not just what I wanted to do, but it was who I was. I’m a writer because, through dull or difficult seasons, I’m always drawn to it.

After five years, I’m so excited to publish my first novel this summer. (The first in a trilogy). I’m ready to share my stories and my writing process with the world.

And readers, if you stayed with me this long, I promise I’m getting faster at writing.