Part 4

And just like that it’s time to write another blog post. Last week I wrote about what my writing journey was like for the first ten or so years after high school. This week I plan on writing about what it was like when this whole thing first started to get some real teeth back in May of 2019.

So, if I wrote the fantasy short story that started all of this back in my senior year of high school, why did it take until 2019 for things to really get going? Well, I already alluded to some of the background stuff I was going through during that time, and I also wrote a bit about how my interest in this project was geared more towards having all of this be a set of rules for a TTRPG for most of that period. All of that is true, and looking back on it, I would say that as the years went on, the small group of people who were interested in playing the TTRPG dwindled, and I myself lost interest in developing it for long stretches of time, until my interest in all of this shifted completely to telling my story.

And man, what a convoluted mess of a situation that ended up being. Even now my mind is a mangled montage of moments and things I want to say regarding the process that led to me writing this very article at this very moment, but the best place to start this part of the story is from the beginning, so that’s where we’ll begin.

I don’t exactly recall what led to the very first writing session I gave myself back in May 2019, but I do remember that I was feeling depressed, hollow, and perhaps most importantly, bored. I’ve always been a pretty big gamer, but there were a few periods post high-school where the hobby lost a bit of its appeal. Most of the time it was because there were no new games worth the money, and I’m pretty sure the restless boredom that arises from having too many options that don’t seem worth the time to choose is what led to me deciding to try my hand at writing again.

I was considering pulling up the first version of the story that eventually became the book I’m going to release for sale sometime in the coming months, but doing so would be pointless because the timestamp would just show the most recent date I saved it, not the date I created it. I’m pretty sure I remember there being a ‘date-created’ thing in the options menu of Word, but I can’t be bothered to go and do all of that, so no exact starting date for us. Yay.

But, even without the creation date, I can still tell the rest of this portion of the story. So Day 1, whenever that was, saw me wake up and do whatever it was I did that day that eventually led to me deciding to turn on my pc and create a new word document. Then, once it was created and opened, I was overcome by a feeling that I can only describe as uncertain petrification. It was somewhere around like 10am or whatever when I first turned on my pc, and almost like 4 or 5pm by the time I closed it and did whatever it was that I did for the rest of that day.

During that time, I wrote a grand total of zero words. That’s right. Zero. Zilch. Nana. I spent however many hours that day sitting at my pc staring at a blinking cursor on a blank page and failed to type a single freaking word. Not one. Now, remember that this was not my first time ever trying to write something, but that day, all I felt was the overwhelming pressure and uncertainty of what I’d gotten myself into.

On and on it blinked and I had no idea what I was doing. It was then that the reality of the fact that my story was never going to exist if I didn’t accept and embrace the responsibility of having to write each and every single word myself  hit me. The document was there and ready to be used, but it was solely on me and me alone to write my story. It was up to me to make not only the large scale choices and decisions that I had during my time creating the TTRPG rules, but also the small scale choices every writer faces with each word they write. There was something about having to develop the macro into a series of events and translate them into the micro words on the page that was simply too much for me on that first day, and I ended up writing nothing.

When I closed Word that day, I avoided reopening it for like a week or a month or something, because I didn’t want to see that blinking cursor blink anymore. However, at whatever date however long later, I did reopen Word, and I did start typing some words. Truly, a startling revelation I know. I don’t remember exactly how long I spent writing that day, but it was at least a few hours, and in that time I managed to type something like 150-250 words.

That was another debilitating moment for me. I remember how hard I was trying to choose the right words, and how hard it was to pin down what I wanted that first scene to be and how impossible it was to write out what was happening moment to moment. It took a lot of time and effort to write those first scant words on the page, and when I realized how all of that energy, and the headache that accompanied it resulted in so little I was demoralized. I didn’t want to do it anymore. I felt like a failure, and like what the creative writing teacher said to me was true.

Everything felt impossible. If I couldn’t even write a couple of paragraphs over the course of a day, then what hope did I have of ever achieving anything in that space? It was a hopeless, pointless endeavor and I wanted to quit. I think I did quit for another month or two after that, but eventually, just like a scolded dog hoping that this time would be different, I came back to my project. I read over what I wrote during the previous session, and spent something like an hour figuring out how to word my first new sentence. The same feelings of pointless dread loomed over me, but despite it all, I continued on.

Looking back on it, I think that the state of suicidal indifference I spent most of my life existing through played a pretty decent role in getting me through those first few bouts of existential depression. Strange how that works. Anyway, whatever the reason was, I continued to toil away at my pc for a few hours that day and eventually ended up with my very first page of written content. Now, again I know that I have said that I wrote a few short stories for the creative writing class, and that I also attempted to write a more comprehensive story after, but all of that was like, seven to nine years in the past at this point. Also, the content that I was exploring was completely different to what I was writing before, so all-in-all I’m pretty comfortable saying that the page I finished that day was in fact the very first page of what turned out to be my story.

I came back the next day, and remember feeling something akin to a positive emotion over the fact that I made the effort to try writing for two consecutive days. Now, it’s not that I can’t figure out what the emotion was, but rather that a ‘positive’ emotion for me during those years equated to a ‘sad’ emotion for regular people. Anyway, the point is I returned to write for a second consecutive day, and wrote somewhere along the lines of like, 250 words over the span of like four or five hours.

Honestly, those stats kind of horrify me, because, for example, this blog post is currently at exactly 1393 words right now and I have been writing for like, ten minutes or something. Now, yes, it is easier for me to write a blog post than a short story or a chapter because writing my thoughts as they come takes a lot less, uh, well thought, than transcribing a narrative on the page. But even so, the chapter I wrote for the first draft that I am currently working on (spoilers I guess, but I have a lot more of the Tales of The Den series written than just the first book (which still isn’t out T.T)) is over 5,000 words and took me a couple of hours to write.

Anyway, back when I was at the point where writing over 300 words in a day was an achievement for me, I grew more invested in what I was writing with each passing day, and slowly but surely found myself becoming more and more engrossed in my own creativity again until my story was once again the only thing I ever thought about. Seeing what was going to happen next as I wrote it out was the only excitement I had in my life, and I was totally content with that. In fact, looking back on my life, I can’t really think of anything else that ever made me feel actual excitement in any way. Maybe back when I was a regular little kid, like when I was like seven or something, I felt the same kind of joy and glee that regular people experience growing up. But, from around fifth or sixth grade onward, none of my life experiences never really made me feel anything, at least nothing resembling a positive emotion. Or, if it did make me feel something positive, like a joke that made me laugh, the feeling was fleeting and held no staying power past the moment of its relevance. Maybe that’s part of why I’ve been able to commit to this project more than anything else.

Getting back on track, I spent the rest of the year writing at least a little pretty much every day. I can’t say for certain that I wrote every single day, but there was definitely no substantial breaks in between sessions. On and on I wrote, until, by the end of the year, I had a Word document that was 282 single spaced pages of story, and I was disgusted with what I wrote. Why? Because it was trash. I remember very clearly starting that final writing session excited to continue and ending both the session and the story abruptly when I asked myself “Where is this going?” I did not have an answer and my follow up question of “What’s the point?” terminated the project on the spot.

Now, the “What’s the point?” question was not asked in a “I’m wasting my time” kind of way, but rather it was a genuine question. I had several hundred thousand words written and I didn’t know what my story was about, where it was going or what the point, from a story telling perspective, was.

So, just like that, I scraped the entire project and started over from scratch. I tried starting over the next day, but couldn’t. However, this time, it was not because of any kind of negative emotion, but because I simply didn’t know what to write. I didn’t know what the point of the previous version was, so until I had some kind of answer I couldn’t continue. So, from there, I spent all of my free time, of which I had more than enough, obsessing over the questions that caused me to abandon the previous project.

Eventually I arrived at some sort of answer and started again. The main character stayed the same, but a lot of the supporting characters were either cut, reworked, reimagined or otherwise repurposed and version two began. This time I wrote 121 single-spaced Word pages before asking myself the same questions and immediately abandoning the project again. Thinking of how to describe my thoughts and feelings regarding all of this is kind of strange, because there’s no malice or anything associated with it. It’s just pragmatic logic. Version one had no point to it so I abandoned it. Version two wasn’t going anywhere so I abandoned it. There were an endless list of questions I did not have answers to, and finding them was the only thing that mattered.

I remember there were a lot of nights where I would spend hours on the phone with my older sister trying to talk through the litany of problems I was having. At first they were centered around the idea of “please save me and give me the answers”, but over time turned into, “What about this? Okay, so why doesn’t that work?” Those times, regarding both the abandoned versions and discussions, led to a lot of things that ended up appearing in the final version of book 1.

For example, the inciting incident of book 1, and consequently the inciting incident of the entire series, is an event that took place on page 187 of version one. Now, think about that for a second. In my first attempt it took me well over 100,000 words to get to the inciting incident. I was painfully unaware of things as simple and basic as that during that time, and is why I instinctually knew I had to scrap everything and start over, time after time.

My third version lasted 87 pages before I threw it all away again and started over. Version four ended up with twelve chapters that were each 12,000-20,000 words long before I discarded it and started over yet again. Keep in mind that during all of this writing, I was spending well over 12-15 hours a day trying to find the answers to the ceaseless questions I had. There were plenty of times where I was frustrated and downtrodden, but there was something so tantalizingly interesting about all of it that my mind simply refused to let it go.

Over and over I tried to answer the simplest of questions like, “who is the main character?”, and over and over I failed. Time after time I changed backstories, added and removed characters and all of that stuff, and time after time I ditched it all and started from scratch.

Then, finally, on my fifth attempt, I altered the initial concept enough for my mind to accept the premise and thus began what would go on to be the first draft of the novel that will eventually go on sale.

But, I think that I’ll save talking about the first draft, and the things that developed there after for next week’s blog post, which means that I guess this is it for now. So, with that said, thanks for reading and I’ll see you next week. Later.