Part 2

So. Here we are. Another week, another blog post. This week’s post is going to be a bit more streamlined than last week’s, at least I think it will be. I thought writing down my thoughts in real time as they came to me would make blogging easier, but the mixture of my scatterbrained ramblings and my writer’s focus on things like sentence structure are clashing in a way that just leaves me with a headache.

On the one hand, my mind wants to speak uninhibited and free, while on the other I want to present something that is well, presentable. But I guess that’s a me problem, then again, this entire post is going to be a me problem. Those of you who don’t know my story or didn’t know me from when I was in the age range of like, twelve to twenty-nine, are obviously going to be unaware of the mountains of baggage I need to sort through to find the gems of relevant information to tell this story in this format.

For those of you who did know me during that time, I’m sorry.

But, before this post derails completely, allow me to tell you what this article is going to be about, after making you read more than two-hundred words. So much for streamlined, I guess.

Okay, enough reflection and stalling. It’s time to start peeling the curtain back and putting my vulnerability in a format that anyone and everyone can read. Great. Thank you to whoever suggested I write a blog about how and why my writing journey started.

In case you somehow haven’t noticed yet, this post in particular is going to be rather unpleasant for me to write. But, I said enough stalling, and I meant it so here we go.

So. How did all of this start? What got me into writing, and why have I kept at it for all of these years?

The answer is as simple as it is complicated.

The next little bit of this post may seem like I’m going off on a random tangent again, but I have actually thought this part out, so it’s going somewhere I promise. Think of it as the context necessary to get an idea for why writing has such a pronounced role in my life nowadays.

When I think of my childhood, I generally group my memories into one of two camps. The first are the memories of a regular childhood where I spent my formative years just being a kid. The other camp are the memories that are important to this post but are also none of your business.

Somewhere along the way the things I felt and experienced in real-time converged into some complicated broken mess that was built on a foundation of hypocritical contradictions which ultimately collapsed.

Why does any of that matter? Well, because my writing journey began when I was sailing through that storm without a mast or rudder.

The genesis of this post that you are reading right now happened during my senior year of high school. At that time, there were quite literally only two things in the entire world that held any real value to me. Anything else was a pointless waste of time, and anyone else was just someone I knew.

Again, to everyone who spent time around me back then, I’m sorry.

Now out of everything I have written so far, the main element we need to focus on is how everything felt like a pointless waste of time to me. No matter what I did, who I was with or what was going on, the most positive and blog-reader friendly way I can think of to describe my interest in any of the happenings of my life would be, “I mean, I guess.”

I watched tv shows because they were on. I played games and read books because they passed the time. I interacted with people because they were there. I went to school because I cared so little about everything that I couldn’t even care enough to skip class. When I was in class I was either sleeping, leaning back in my chair staring at the ceiling, or talking to whoever happened to be sitting next to me.

I never did any work, and when I did, I disregarded the entirety of the teacher’s instructions and turned in whatever I felt like. For example, in art class in my freshman year, the final had us create a watercolor painting of a landscape or something that incorporated all of the things we learned in class. I turned in a stick figure drawing of a cow.

Or in Graphic Design, when the subject matter was creating a business logo, I turned in a three-thousand slide PowerPoint of an escalating war between two stick figure guys.

Ah, and then of course was the semester I spent in ceramics. The teacher did his thing of, you know, teaching us how to create ceramic stuff, and I was actually on board for a while. And, by on board, I of course mean, I spent the first three weeks in class screwing around because figuring out new ways to cause catastrophic failure to my would-have-been bowls and plates was endlessly amusing. That was, until, I had the realization that someone I knew had a birthday coming up and the best gift I could have given them was a hyper-detailed bust of a clown mask that I owned, because they were, of course, terrified of clowns. So, with my purpose clear, I locked in and spent all of my time in that class creating something that had absolutely nothing to do with the curriculum.

In other classes that taught standard subjects like english and math, the only items I ever turned in were tests like mid-terms, which I always aced. By my junior year and especially in my senior year when I took a bunch of AP classes, I realized how simple it was for me to pass any class regardless of subject or level and min-maxed my remaining high-school years to ensure that my final grade was at least an 80%. That gave me a B which kept my parents from wasting my time going through the song and dance of low grades on a report card and freed up about 98% of my time to do literally anything else, which usually consisted of some combination of sleeping, gaming, reading or being callously indifferent to the people who wanted to spend time with me.

I get that I’m not painting myself in a good light here, but being accountable means being honest and owning your mistakes, and my biggest mistake was my general state of existence during my teenage years, and most of my twenties, to be fair.

So now that everyone has a sense for just how much of an aloof, indifferent, disengaged, uninterested slacker I was when it came to pretty much every aspect of my life it is finally time to start talking about the class that, in hindsight, changed my life forever.

During the spring semester of my junior year, I was sitting in my homeroom class filling out a form that would determine what electives I would have for my senior year. The classes that I was going to pick had to meet two criteria: seem like a do-nothing class where I would pass for simply signing up for it and be a class that I could take with the girl I was dating.

Honestly, I’ve forgotten what the other electives I chose were, but that’s okay because none of them matter, to me as a person, or to this story. The one elective that I do remember is the one that met both criteria and is the subject of this story: Creative Writing.

I mean, obviously it was a creative writing class, but if any of you thought it would be something like Spanish 3 then please let me know.

So, what was it about this creative writing class that changed everything for me? Well, at first, nothing. When I found out that it was on my schedule, I planned to do what I did in every other class, which was of course nothing more than I needed to pass with a B-.

I do remember thinking that the premise of the class was pretty neat because the teacher was a published author. Then as the first few weeks of the class went on, I learned that they also had a school club that was centered around a tabletop role playing game based in the world of their book. Or was it books? Eh, whatever, it doesn’t really matter.

What does matter is I found the concept to be fascinating and was drawn to it like a moth to flame, or Icarus to the sun is a more fitting analogy I suppose.

Anyway, I paid attention and actively participated in class. I also signed up for the club, which was one of two clubs I joined in high school, and the only one that I actually wanted to join. I remember there were times when I would be walking home and I would be actively thinking about how strange feeling interested in something was, but I went with it because I liked it. So, the semester goes on, and I write like three or four short stories in different genres to fit the teacher’s prompts, and I played a few sessions of the TTRPG, and then, came the final project.

My final for the creative writing class was a fantasy short story, and that short story is the progenitor of every piece of work I have written since and the nexus from which everything else was built around.

I don’t know what it was at the time, but there was something about my own story in my own setting with my own characters that just became an irresistible obsession to me. I spent every day for the next three weeks writing and rewriting and rewriting and rewriting and rewriting and rewriting and rewriting the story again and again and again because I wanted it to be just right and because I came up with new ideas with every draft.

If I wasn’t writing, it was because I was in some class, in which case I was thinking about it instead of whatever the class was about. If I was around someone, I spoke to them with the zeal of a kid showing off the shiny new toy they got for their birthday.

I said earlier that at that point in my life there were only two things in my life that actually mattered to me. Now, there was a third.

So, the day comes when the final is due, and I turned it in with the nervous excitement of getting it back so I could see the comments the teacher left on it. A few days later, and like a week or so before winter break, if my memory serves me right, the teacher returned all of our stories, and I can’t for the life of me remember any of the comments left on it, if there were any at all.

But that doesn’t matter. What does matter was the not-quite announcement the teacher made about how they reached a deal with their publisher to have them review some of the better stories. However, the kick to the gut was hearing that the program was going to start with the next semester’s creative writing class. However however, the inspirational part of this story is when the teacher looked at me and said, “if you would have taken my class next semester, you would have been published.”

That sentence escalated my hyper-fixation on the short story into a full-blown, now lifelong obsession. The semester was ending, and for the first, and only, time in my life I was sad that a class was over. But, that sadness did not deter me, and I shifted my focus from writing a story to building out the world. However, my older sister and I were going to spend the first week of winter break in San Diego with our biological dad, and our grandparents on his side, so his parents.

That was a really fun ten days, and I still think about that trip a fair bit, even more so in recent years.

Anyway, back to the story. I took my notes with me and spent all of my free time during that trip working on the world. It was during this time where I created the pantheon, the regions, the races and the first iteration of the types of magic used. I still distinctly remember it took me pretty much the entire drive back to tell them about the seedling of a world I had at the time. When we got back, it was still winter break, and I spent that first day with the people who wanted to see me. Then, from that second day onward, I devoted every waking moment to developing my idea further.

The bottleneck in my creative plan was I had no idea how to write. Like, looking back on that short story, which I still have the original Word file for, it was so abysmal that I felt actual embarrassment the last time I read it. Then I sent it to one of my sisters, who has since roasted me every time it gets brought up because it is just a vomit-covered dumpster-fire.

Anyway, my focus back in the early days was defining concepts and even if I knew how to write, I felt that writing a story was the wrong approach. So, following that feeling, I spent a couple of days at a bookstore reading through TTRPG player manuals. My intent was to see how successful games structured and organized their information and to use that knowledge in conjunction with what I gleaned from the TTRPG club to create a set of rules that established the concepts I was defining.

And now we get to the final part of this particular story by explaining the Icarus analogy from earlier.

A large part of my motivation to develop as many ideas as I could before school started up again was the desire that I had to show what I had to the creative writing teacher. So, I did all of the stuff, found a way to print it, somehow acquired one of those fancy business binder/folder things, and put it all together. Then, on the first day of the spring semester I got to school over an hour early and had an interaction I will never forget.

When I went into the teacher’s room, the lights were dimmed, and they were sitting behind their desk speaking to three other students that I recognized from the TTRPG club. I walked up to the teacher and asked if they would take a look at the world I created.

They looked at me and asked, “What are your rules?”

The question caught me off guard and I turned into a stammering blabbing mess that probably couldn’t have told someone my name if they asked.

The teacher asked me the question again, and I answered with, “Do you mean the game rules or like the rules of the world?”

They then asked me what my goals and intentions were, and I told them that I wanted to develop it into something bigger than what it was at the time and depending on how things played out, maybe turn it into a video game, movie or show one day.

“It sounds to me like you’re suffering from delusions of grandeur. Do you really think that you can recreate in two weeks what I spent the last sixteen years creating by plagiarizing me?”

They say people don’t remember what you say, but how you made them feel. Well, I remember both.

So, that’s the genesis of my writing journey. I have a lot more to say regarding that quote, but I’ll talk about it in my next post.

For now, I want to end this blog post by saying that while I reject the plagiarism part, everything else they said to me during that conversation was the reality check I needed.

So, if you ever end up reading this, and somehow remember me, then this last part of the post is for you. Thank you for the scathing rejection. I know there was probably some underlying dislike you had for me that flavored some of the words you chose, but even so, when it came to the heart of your criticism, you were right. The perspective I’ve gained throughout this process has proven the delusions of grandeur part of your statement true because I had no idea what I was getting myself into. However, after tallying the price I’ve paid so far and seeing just how far I still am from where I want to be, my message to everyone reading this is simple.

I will succeed.