Rayla Gomez | Introduction

At the start of Drama class in eighth grade, my teacher told the class that we would watch a movie and write a response paper to it later. As usual, when the words ‘response paper’ came out of the teacher’s mouth, everyone groaned. She ignored them and turned out the light before starting the movie.

The oldest, most outdated music came out of the television and I just stared. This movie was in black and white! I made disappointed noises with the rest of the class this time. Since I didn’t really have anyone to converse with, I simply kept watching the old black-and-white film. As the story began to unfold, I realized that it wasn’t half-bad.

The story was a film with Marilyn Monroe starring as the leading lady that was set back in the 1920s. There were also two dumb brothers who reminded me of the highly unentertaining Three Stooges. However, what caught my interest wasn’t the beautiful Monroe or the supposedly comical brothers, but the mobsters. The men with machine guns and pinstripe suits and smooth but deadly conversation waiting readily on their tongues; now those were the characters worth watching!

When the bell rang for lunch to start, everyone bolted for the door anticipating poor food and a social hour with friends. I stayed and watched the last fifteen minutes of the movie with vigor. I couldn’t wait to see the end.

Once I had my fill of a happy Hollywood ending, I left the classroom with clear intentions to write a book. It sounded absurd in my mind, so I kept it to myself. I knew I was only thirteen years old but I wanted so badly to get the idea onto paper that I didn’t care how awful my handwriting, grammar, or punctuation would be.

I sat down at an empty lunch table and wrote as fast as I could, promising myself to edit everything later. When someone tapped me on the shoulder, I was already four pages into my new composition book. I looked up and saw a girl from one of my classes who I knew as Dani.

“Can I sit here?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said, looking back down at my composition book. After a few minutes of silent awkwardness she asked me what I was writing. I shyly told her it was a story about frog mobsters. I loved frogs and anything to do with them so of course I had to include them in my first novel!

She asked politely if she could read what I had so far. I, surprised that anyone other than a teacher would want to read my writing, said shyly, “If you really want to.”

Her eyes moved from line to line and before I knew it she was finished and smiling widely. “Will you write more?” she asked.

I was thinking to myself, Does she actually like it?? And then my motivation kicked into overdrive. If one person enjoyed my writing, then to stop would mean disappointment and another unfinished story to toss aside. And this idea had such a strong hold on me that I knew I had to write every detail out for myself.

So every day for two months, I would write scene after scene of my growing story and Dani would read every word I scribbled down.

When I finally added the finishing touches to The Frog Mob, it was thirty-five pages long. My one reader was excited to read the ending, and when she did she requested a sequel.

That day, I realized that I wanted to become an author. I wanted to be a weaver of stories so amazing that they would become bestsellers, my name living on long after I died and my stories entertaining people for many years after that.

The summer after eighth grade, I rewrote my short novel intending to make it longer and with more details. Two weeks before school started again, I finished my new edited version of The Frog Mob with a total of one hundred and seventeen notebook pages. Although I was proud of the quantity of my work, I was more pleased with the quality because I knew I had worked hard on it.

So because of one reader, I was able to finish something I thought no one but me cared about. Back then I needed that assurance, and with that motivation I turned an idea from a movie into an idea for what I want to be.