Apologies to anyone still hanging about watching this space.
So what have I been up to? I would say “nothing”, but that is the lazy answer.
I stopped the other day, and tried to pin point when I started to write.
My earliest stories were formed in my head.I have “written” stories in my head for years; since I was a young kid. However mine weren’t grand epics of originality. I would play the “What If” game. After reading a story or watching a television show, I would think to myself: What if this happened instead of that? What I didn’t know was what I was doing was fan fiction. I never wrote these stories down on paper, so most of them are lost. When I did write stories down, they were “original” things written out in long hand with pencil. We didn’t have a computer. I still have those stories but I have never transcribed them and put them into the computer.
In the late 90’s, the Internet exploded. Our family purchased a computer with Internet capabilities.
This changed my life.
I found fan communities, and fan art, and fan fiction. I had always been a thinker of stories, but I had never written them down. I finally found a community which was begging for continuations of the television show we were all watching. I really liked the show, liked the fandom, and decided to write a story. It was eagerly consumed. So I wrote four more with plans to write more (which never came to fruition) before I burned out. I stayed with the fandom until it shrank, and then like many people I moved on to the next thing. I didn’t write any more fan fiction though. I found I enjoyed reading other people’s fan fiction than writing my own. Some of the writers were really good.
I flitted from fandom to fandom until I stopped and thought to myself: “What am I doing? Why am I wasting my time reading other people’s stuff when I could be writing my own?”
Going off to college really changed my mindset when it came to my writing. Before I left, it was about what was quick and easy. The plots were simplistic and shallow. Going to school, and meeting other writers changed how complex my stories were. My characters gained depth. The plots were mired in not only “get the girl” or whatnot, but also political, social-economical, and racial tensions. I didn’t realize that those influences were creeping in until I was trying to think of a conclusion to a story, and realized that there was no way to tie it up in a neat little bow. There is no fixing deeply seated racism and religious tensions. If there was there would be world peace.
My stories have changed, but my habits haven’t. I still write stories in my head, and am reluctant to commit them to paper. I do have some in the computer, but they are just floating around in little think tanks. I think it is time I take them out of the tanks and put them on paper. See how it goes. They deserve to be shared I think. Once it is on paper, printed out, edited, recompiled, and held in my hands then I can say: “Look, I wrote this.”
