I am writing again.
Ever since I first laid my eyes upon Brian Jacques' masterpiece Redwall Series in 2nd Grade, I have been obsessed with the fantasy genre. Admittedly, my exposure has been limited to just a few series: Redwall, Shanara, Wheel of Time, a few smaller Christian books, and a series that shall be nameless (after deciding it was too inappropriate in content, I got rid of it, so while it is written well, I do not want to appear to endorse it). While my exposure has been limited, I have made a head-first plunge into what few fantasy series I have read, especially Redwall and Wheel of Time (understatement of the decade, when applied to the latter!)
Almost from my earliest days of Redwall, I have shared an obsession with writing.
I am a creative person. To say I am right-brained is an understatement. While I am very logical, I use my logic creatively; I am skilled at taking my illogical conclusions and make sense out of them with logical arguments train of thought. Other than my logic, my left-brain is almost nonexistent, especially when bored with math and science.
My writing started in 2nd Grade, the same year that I started my Redwall craze. (On a side note, reading 7th Grade level reading material does wonders to a 2nd Grader who does not like to read much, especially if said material is captivating and interests the 2nd Grader.) I remember writing a book which was later bound. My book was about a boy which was captured by a lion, who traded him with a dragon. In the dragon's dungeon, the boy found the key and found his freedom. The End. Also in my illustrations, I showed that they key was under a trapdoor, and if the boy had looked in another trapdoor, he would have also found a musket. Like I said, my creativity ran wild.
Writing and Drawing have always been an outlet for my creativity. Some times I suddenly get this overwhelming urge to just express my creative ideas. I will get to a sketch pad or paper (later, computer screen) and hold the pencil poised over it, waiting for an idea to pop out. Besides being creative, I am a perfectionist-- but usually only in the context of straightening crooked pictures on my wall, and in creating only a masterpiece in my art or writing, or at least something which, at the time, I think might be worthy of that masterful title. Anything less bothers me enough that I often cannot stand to look at it later, unless peering over childhood stories and artwork.
My writing craze struck again in 4th Grade, this time in my 2nd actual bound-book assignment.
The Search for the Glooks was my masterpiece, and I spent hours working on it. I irritated one of the class parents volunteering as an assistant (who will remain nameless), when I had half the progress of the rest of my class, but wanting only perfection, I perservered in my slower pace, especially where my artwork was concerned, although it did bother me that I was being rushed at the expense of missing "Literature" (the teacher reading aloud) to focus more on my story. I ended up running out of time, to the effect of the last half of my artwork being vastly inferior to the first half, but I was still proud. Looking back, my story was simply terrible, but I realize now that it was not the story that was so poor, but it was my undeveloped ability to portray on paper what was in my mind alone.
I have always had a problem of portraying my imagination. It is just so huge, complex, and detailed, that often it surpasses my skills of storytelling or depiction through art; quite a frustrating problem for someone whose head oft comes close to exploding after not draining its creativity enough to release the pressure.
My third (and final) bound-book project came two years later, in 6th Grade. I had recycled the plot of my 4th Grade story, knowing full-well that the plot was good, but that my portrayal was the only weakness. Looking back, the plot could have been improved, but hey-- it was pretty good for a kid that young. Again, I ran out of time with the artwork, although the writing and artwork both were vastly improved.
After my last required attempt at my story, I began several rewrites in middle school, but they all fizzled out. My writing was just not advanced, and I found myself with a problem that would last until college: I was able to take hold of my narrative writing, but put two characters in the same room, and I could not write their dialogue to save my life. For this reason, my writing was put on hold until a couple of years after high school.
Since then, I have done many short stories, most of them for class, and have worked on two larger stories as well. The first one focused on a girl who is an elf disguised as a human, but does not know it because her parents died when she was young (yes, very loosely borrowed concept from Harry Potter, though I did not realize this until later). Developing the backstory (I do this in EVERYTHING I write these days), I realized there was even more of a story in the past, and I decided to do a trilogy-- one with the history of the elves, one with Merlin (an elf), and one with the present-day story. After a good 15 or 20 tries though, I never got past five pages. It still sits on my metaphorical shelf.
This time, though, I finally have a keeper.
The story I am writing now is science fiction. I have never written a Sci Fi before, and I had no desire to until one day, while trying to occupy my time on a bus in Korea, I was pondering the annoyance that, apart from Battlestar Gallactica, no Sci Fi series that I knew of really accurately portrayed the military, or how it would likely develop going into space. (For example, it took Star Trek until its second spin-off series to realize that the military has more than JUST officers. It still bugs me that Chief O'Brien was retroactively made into a Senior Chief Petty Officer when he went an entire series as a Lieutenant who was Chief of his section.) From this idea, I made a list of military ranks from three branches of the military, and my story was born.
After having nothing but ranks, I soon developed a character's name, and later a very basic plot. Then previous problems hit me, and plagued by my perfection, I must have gone through half a dozen tries. Then I found it: The Snowflake Method. I adapted this writing method to fit my own needs. I summarized my story in a sentence, then a paragraph, and then into 5 paragraphs. Then I found the idea for my prologue and wrote it as well.
Today I am in my 8th page. As far as I know, I have never made it to 8 pages before-- instead, I have written 20 or 30 pages in a single story, but due to deletions made by my perfectionistic qualities, those 20 to 30 pages were compiled of the many, many tries for my first 3 or 4 pages.
While history would tell you that I am doomed to fail, I am optimistic; I am further than ever before, and apart from a temporary one which I finally broke through, I have not yet hit a major wall, and have an idea of how things will unfold for the rest of the story. Will I make it? Only time will tell. One thing, though, that I know for certain: I must try, or my head will explode.
will be released on October 26, 2010.
If you are not aware, I am what you could call not just an enthusiastic fan, but even maybe a rabid fan of the Wheel of Time series. Unfortunately, a couple of years ago its author, Robert Jordan, passed away from a rare bone disease similar to cancer. At the time of his passing, his series had 12 volumes, with one more to go. The last volume, titled "A Memory of Light," was outlined, with about 1/3 of it in a rough draft form, with a few smaller sections worked out to completion. Jordan's wife hired Brian Sanderson to finish the series, so Jordan and Sanderson are credited as co-authors. The last volume was also divided into three sections because it was just too big! It was physically impossible to bind a book that was the size of three seperate large books!
