Writing in my Fantasy World

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.