From a young age, Lavinia Ding has used writing as an outlet for her thoughts and ideas. She uses her creativity and imagination to fabricate entire worlds, characters and stories that fascinate her.

“I love creating characters,” she said. “I suppose it’s my narcissistic, God-like complex speaking here, but there’s something so powerful about it. The lengths I go to are incredible; I spend literal months hand-crafting them to perfection. I write detailed profiles about each of them, their strengths, weaknesses, backstories, relationships with every other character in my book – all the way down to their star sign. Each one of my character profiles can take up to 4 pages.”

Lavinia started writing when she was five years old after an intense dream she wanted to share with her mother.

“Eager to spill out every detail of whatever dream my mind had conjured up, I ran back to my room, grabbed a nearby notebook and pen, flicked on the light switch and began scribbling my heart out,” she  said. “Haven’t put down my pen since.”

In middle school, Lavinia drew inspiration from fictional works and wrote “fanfiction.” Now, she comes up with her own ideas for stories.

“My past works were all fanfiction; sad, but true,” she said. “To date, I have 97 finished and unfinished stories stored in a USB drive, most of which exceed 100 pages. Recently, though, I’ve only written original works – a hobby that started after I realized that I was probably old enough to create, shape, and develop my own characters, plot, and writing style instead of mooching off of someone else’s.”

Lavinia prefers to move away from reality and dream up fantastical stories.

“[The focus of my stories are] always fiction and always fantasy,” she said. “Real life is too boring and depressing. I write to escape real life, not to immerse myself further in it. Defeats the whole purpose in my book.”

Though she does not write as much as she used to, Lavinia’s ideas usually start small and expand with her inventive imagination.

“I used to crank out new stories pretty much weekly, whenever an idea popped into my head,” she said. “Now, it’s a much slower process. I haven’t actually written a new story in over a year. Stories usually start out as a little inkling in my head, a little, ‘Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if…?’”