Sept 1st, 2020
Yesterday we dealt with how to start, kind of. I will admit that was a bit of a ramble and a lot of speculation. I'm sure I will be back around to that topic again at some point. But what for today?
I thought I would tell you a little bit about why I write and why I only started recently. Warning, this may come across as therapy for me, but it is my website and my blog so skip it or come along, either way: this story is being told.
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My story of writing starts before I ever knew I enjoyed writing. All I knew of was the stories I liked, and I even started liking them somewhat accidentally. I have always been a reader but up until one Christmas I sort of existed only to read and digest the stories of others. Stephen King was one of my early favourites, unfortunately for my young mind depending on your opinion of Mr. King.
In any case I received a book of a genre I had never considered before: Fantasy. To be specific, it was Elfshadow by Elaine Cunningham, part of the Forgotten Realms world. I read it, then I re-read it, then I read it again. I was amazed by the depth of world building in the book, all these places familiar to the writer and even to her presumed readers. To me however, they were all mysteries. As familiar as ancient Greece was to me at the time. The words, however, were not "Greek" to me. The words made sense to me even though I was missing large swaths of the story.
Of course, not the book, not the story in my hands at the time. The wider story, the world in which this story took place. The world that these characters knew as well as I knew Earth in the real world. Well, I was maybe ten years old so maybe I didn't know Earth that well.
Regardless, this was both my first exposure to the fantasy genre and to world building in general. It was a defining moment in my creativity. From that point forward it was no longer Lego robots fighting to claim the Lego castle, now it was Robots of opposing factions, each trying to claim the castle for their own reasons.
When I read more books, I started to wonder more about the why characters did things instead of just being awestruck or fascinated by the things they did. Why would Bilbo want to disappear after such a long life? Didn't he like his family and neighbours? I don't think he did, or at least half of them half as much as they deserved anyway. But the questions began to ring in my mind.
Who was this hero/villain/nobody? Why did they take that turn in the dark hallway instead of this one? What would have happened if they had? Hundreds of questions bounced around in my young head every time I devoured a new book. And it all made reading more enjoyable to me.
From here we fast forward to high school. It was in my Writer's Craft course that I first wrote something I thought was outstanding. A story of a boy on the rocky shore of a lake watching a storm roll in, the boy tries to outrun the rain and has a small adventure on his way home that included pizza and puddles before getting home in time to hear his mother calling him inside. I wish I still had a copy of it to see if nostalgia has coloured it at all in my memories. One day maybe I'll rewrite it if I can.
I was proud. I had created something that even the teacher praised as being a tremendous piece of writing. I was still holding the printed paper in my hands when my Dad got home that night. 95% by the way, that is the mark I got. I was damn proud, though to me it was not the 95% that caused the swelling of pride. It was the first time I had formed an idea, created that idea and finished the idea while maintaining my focus on the task. Anyone who has been a teenager should know just how hard that is.
So, my Dad came home, I couldn't wait and rushed to show him. His response:
"It's good. But your friend wrote it right?"
It would have been kinder, in my hindsight twenty years removed, had he literally stabbed me in the heart instead of only figuratively. I had no idea how to even respond. Now in later years I asked that friend if he had written it and he said he had heavily edited one of my essays in high school and handed it in for me. When I described the story, he looked confused and said it definitely was not that one.
Regardless, what followed involved a drunken command to replicate my work in less than an hour, me writing a different piece of work about a man stuck in traffic and growing more and more frustrated that things wouldn't keep moving and eventually my not living at home any more. There was obviously more to it than all of that but that's the essence of what needs told.
Over the next years, I tried to recapture the feeling by starting to DM in Dungeons and Dragons and trying to go to college for photojournalism (I also really enjoyed photography) but writing specifically was not really in my wheel house. Trauma related I suppose, the trauma of having the one thing you had decided was "your" thing be ripped away and pissed on.
Dungeons and Dragons became my creative outlet along with repeated attempts to work with friends to write something, anything, for Hollywood, Television or Publishing. Typical young adult "rock star" mentality, I was going to make it somehow.
Along the way, the long-term players of my D&D world, Arcaylia as you will likely hear about in future writings, came to genuinely enjoy what I was creating. Some of them still have unanswered questions twenty years later that they swear they will get to the bottom of. And they may, you never know.
It was in creating these stories, modular and movable in the grand scheme of things, that I realized I could weave at very least an interesting narrative. Not always good, rarely but memorably bad, ultimately decent stories that people enjoyed.
I tried my hand at short stories along the way, I even wrote a full book that is terrible and apparently still available on Amazon and no I will not tell you what it is or its title until I rewrite it into something not horrendous. But I never quite felt like I did with that first story. I could never recapture that singular triumphant feeling.
I may not recapture that. That sprouting interest may have been snipped more than in the bud, it may have been cut at the stem right at the base, near the dirt. Leaving only the roots to try and grow something new and never the quite the same. If it can still grow at all.
Well, we will see, won't we? If there are more articles after this one, then maybe I am managing to coax it to grow at least a little.
But what can this help any of you with? A good and valid question, especially after indulging me in my catharsis above. Here is what I would like you all to take from this:
Do not let someone cut you short. Do not let anyone stop you from growing. Be it as a writer, creator, human or anything at all. Take it from me: a life spent being furiously angry at someone for something they did is a tremendous waste, even if frequently an understandable feeling. But it is a feeling I will never wish on my daughters and one I would redo if I could.
That's why I write now, to reclaim lost time and untold stories that may have been had I not wasted so many years.
Give yourself a thought or two and determine why you write; it might just help propel you forward.
Eric
To keep up with my intention of throwing some learning at all of you, here are some links I found when googling "Why We Write", some are damn interesting: