As a child, senior Dynali Weerackoon would spend hours drawing and writing stories on pieces of printer paper, stapling the pages together into booklets. Now graduating, Weerackoon has written several FSPA award-winning works and plans to study technical English in college.
“I was a really big reader as a little kid, and I think if you read enough, it gets you curious about how writing works,” Weerackoon said. “[My first stories] were very, very dramatic. That was the literal only thing that connected all of them together.”
Weerackoon’s first story was a King Arthur imitation. While she sometimes cringes at her early stories, she appreciates their role as a stepping stone into the world of writing.
“I do love seeing the passion that I had for [writing] when I was a kid,” Weerackoon said. “I’m proud of myself for being able to put the stupid stuff on the page, rather than being embarrassed about it.”
While Weerackoon loved writing from the start, her skills came from hard work instead of raw talent.
“Writing is definitely not my strong point creatively,” Weerackoon said. “But with writing, you’re never going to get better at it if you don’t face the fact that a lot of what you write is going to be just straight up trash. [For me] it was important to just put myself out there and not expect Hamlet to pop out onto the page the first time.”
In the future, Weerackoon hopes to write a book of her own, but for now, creative writing is more of a hobby she picks up to destress.
“It’s very stream of consciousness. Like, I’ll write something out in my head first and then put it on paper because sometimes I feel like I’m very scared of that blank page,” Weerackoon said.
Most of Weerackoon’s ideas come from daily life, allowing her to infuse commonplace features in imaginary worlds.
“I love making notes of really specific environments that I’m put into, whether that’s smell, sight, sound, stuff like that. I’m always asking myself, ‘How would I phrase this if I wanted it to come off in a certain way?’ and I think eventually if you collect enough of those details, it becomes a story on its own,” Weerackoon said.
