I think we all know I punted yesterday. Let’s do a little more of a deep dive today. And I promise I’ll get to a politics thing sometime this week. Got a few topics lined up, just need time to write them all.
I’ve been writing and story crafting a long time. When I was a child, even before I could read or write myself, one of my favorite toys was a beige and brown audio tape player/recorder. It’s long gone, but I would record myself narrating various things. I would not say the stories I was making at the time were any good, but I was doing it.
I got more into the habit in 2nd grade, where we had writer’s workshop. Again, this wasn’t anything I was doing in an excellent fashion at this time, but I was building the habit, along with reading. 4th grade I wrote my first (and so far only) Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book, which was simple by any standards, but it actually did work. Still have the notebook with it somewhere. That same year I went to a sleepover for a friend’s birthday and played Dungeons and Dragons for the first time. It was a short game (both my chars died in literally the first combat), but it left enough memory that the next year when I saw the Basic, Expert, Companion, and Master’s sets up in a garage sale for a dollar each, they came home.
I continued writing here and there, and enjoying gamebooks. My writing itself expanded, though a lot of it at the time would fall under “fanfiction” and was hampered in some ways by my upbringing and stances on certain content at the time. I also did a lot of building and playing with LEGO, though it dawned on me years later that the reason I played with LEGO wasn’t because I enjoyed the building, but rather that I enjoyed the stories I was creating with them, and this is why I stopped building once I started getting online more; online RP filled the same niche.
In 2000 I moved on to early forms of actual web-posted fanfiction for Animorphs, and found the Transformation Story Archive and Transform.to. I lurked for a while before becoming more active a few years later. Before I was out of high school I was already writing my own fiction more seriously. Again, not great stuff, but I was working on it. Also took an expository writing class in Senior year, and while I found the topic selection restrictive, it was a good step for me to be able to learn to think more critically about things.
In college, I actually got assigned a writing course, and after the first daily assignment, the professor actually pulled me aside and told me I was doing independent study for him this semester, just doing the big papers, as my first story (which I’d thrown together in maybe an hour before it was due) was at a level that he did not believe I would benefit from coming to class and doing the regular assignments.
Around this same time I started RPing more seriously online; I’ve been through various sites. My initial characters weren’t that great overall, being a wish-fulfillment me, and one of my D&D characters, but I started to expand further as I got practice. There’s a lot to cover over here, but one of the big turning points was when I started RPing Nathan, who was my first ‘normal human’ character in my adult building. That taught me a lot about how a character without powers can be better than one with, because of the struggle.
In the time since, my narrative ability has grown in fits and spurts, though I’m really grabbing the brass ring these days. A lot of the earlier limitations I had are wearing away, both in my ability to handle my own writing, understanding how things would go, and, for that matter, being more honest with myself about if I enjoy it, that’s reason enough for me to do it.
A big problem of mine along the way has been waiting to do, waiting for inspiration, waiting to be better. And the truth is that you never will be in that way, and that’s why I’m here, writing this right now. I’ll only get better by doing, and if I wait to do, to be better, that is self defeating.
There is something deeply human about creation. Why people, given the ability, will often turn to various forms of creative outlet. A way for them to share themselves, and in turn, for the others to share with them. I believe Carl Sagan referred to it as “a way for the universe to know itself.”
And perhaps, just a way to say perhaps the most important thing of all. “I was here. I mattered.”
“We all die. The goal isn’t to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.” -Chuck Palahniuk
I’m sure I’ll come back to this topic in the future.
-Arrow