Kasey Thornton has known she was going to be a writer since seventh grade. Now, as a senior majoring in English, Thornton has a big future ahead and she has already made a name for herself.

While looking at North Carolina State University's Masters of Fine Arts graduate program, Thornton found the NC State Fiction Contest. Her junior year, she submitted a story titled, "I Shall Not Want." It made the top 20 of 300, earning her a position as a semi-finalist.

This year, she gave it another try, entering a story titled "Took Up." She said she had hoped to revise it more, but that it is hard to ever be truly finished with a story. For her efforts, she was awarded one of 11 finalist positions.

"Writers everywhere will understand that there is no such thing as a 'finished' story," Thornton said.

Thornton doesn't write only for competitions. She writes every single day she possibly can, including Christmas Day, Thanksgiving and her birthday.

"As far as my experience with writing in general, it's an obsession," Thornton said.

She said that too much of a good thing can sometimes be bad. At times, she will get so caught up in her writing she bypasses eating, her social life and homework.

Most of her writing concerns motherhood, and what it means to be a mother. Other works ponder how people depend on one another in order to overcome hardships. She comments on the formation of friendships, loyalty between people, how people support one another and sometimes use others to move forward in life.

Thornton has also excelled in professional writing. She co-authored a paper with Elon University professor Rebecca Pope-Ruork that was published in an academic journal. She has worked as an assistant editor for a magazine, freelanced for newspapers, copy edited a novel and helped write a book for a nonprofit organization in Mebane.

Thornton's love for writing began at an early age. In middle school, she filled spiral-bound notebooks with her works. When her family bought a computer, she moved to that.

"Then, I would stay up writing stories as late as my mother would let me and wake up two hours before I had to leave for school to write," she said.

In high school, she said she was lucky enough to have good English teachers, but wrote fictional stories on her own time.

"I probably wrote more between sixth and 12th grade than the average person reads in a lifetime," Thornton said.

All this work taught her the technicalities of good writing. Thornton mastered grammar, syntax, vocabulary as well as description. When she arrived at Elon, she learned more about crafting sentences, plots and stories in appealing ways.

Aside from writing stories, Thornton also enjoys music. She plays the piano and guitar, to name a few, and teaches percussion at her hometown high school.

"I joke with people that I'm happily married to my writing, but music is the passionate love affair I'm having on the side," Thornton said.

Planning on getting her MFA in Creative Writing, Thornton said she hopes to get into UNC Wilmington because she spent a lot of time there as a child. Thornton aims to combine her professional editorial experience with her creative writing experience to become an editor for a publishing agency.

"As a child, whenever someone would ask me what I wanted to do when I grew up, I would always answer, 'write.' When they said, 'Write what?' I would say, 'Everything.' So that's what I'm doing," she said.