When I was twelve, I started writing my first “real” book (that is, a book that was over 50,000 words). It was about a girl and her group of middle school friends who somehow got transported to another realm and had to defeat a bad guy who had kidnapped another friend of theirs. It wasn’t good. There were many issues, but the most glaring was that the lead character was obviously based on myself, the friend characters were based on my views of my friends, and the villain was based off of another student I didn’t like very much. They say “write what you know”, but there are a lot…