Several months ago (back in February), I tried to write an updated description of what exactly this story is, and why I was doing it. Because I have a tendency to be long-winded, that blogpost turned into a long confessional about all my ups and downs as a writer since childhood. And I didn't ever finish it.
An update, of sorts.
When I started this in 2018, I got about 6 chapters end, and then stalled out.
For a few reasons. One is that I wasn't enjoying it. Two is that it wasn't any good, and I was feeling frustrated and embarrassed about how bad the story was turning out. Three is that I had written myself into what I felt was a dead-end with the war with the Bear King plotline.
But actually, for all that, I never intentionally stopped writing. What happened was the usual thing. I had made myself a commitment to write for 15 minutes every day. I had one day when I was particularly busy, and so I missed that one day. Having missed one day, it seemed no harm to miss two days before I started the habit up again. And then I allowed myself to miss 3 days, and 4 days, and pretty soon a few weeks... et cetera.
In other words, I never intentionally stopped writing this story. I always meant to get back into it when I was ready. Even with all the frustrations I was experiencing, I really wanted to continue the experiment with having a continuing story on the go. I had enjoyed this hobby when I was a teenager, and although my teenage stories were never any good either, I enjoyed the feeling of being in control of my own story, and the amusement I felt at discovering the story as I went along. It's one of the things from childhood that, over the years, I've come to regret losing in the transition to adulthood, and I've wanted to recapture it.
Finally in February of this year, I decided to started again. I decided to just discard the War with the Bear King chapters that I had written a year and a half before, and start the story again fresh from chapter 5.
And so, since
My second (and much longer) attempt is here:
When I first started this blog a couple of years ago, I wrote up an explanation at the time about what this was and why I am doing it. (To which I later added an addendum). But I've become dissatisfied with that explanation, so I want to try once again.
The short version is that this blog is an attempt to return to my childhood hobby of writing stories solely for my own amusement.
In the longer version that follows, I'm going to try to sort through exactly why I'm doing this, and whether or not I'm any good at it, and whether or not I even enjoy writing, or just think I enjoy writing.
The much longer version, for anyone who cares, is as follows:
As a kid, I loved making up stories.
A lot of kids do, of course, so I'm not sure if that makes me unique.
Most of the stories I made up were in my head--as a kid, I used to have some sort of epic story constantly going on in my head, which I used to entertain myself before bed, on long car rides, during church sermons, et cetera. (Again, I know this is not unique to me.)
But although I loved making up stories, I was never sure if I loved writing stories. Writing was always laborious. And time consuming. (It took me so long to write down on the page what I could visualize in my head instantly.)
Second and third grade is when I developed enough literacy to write down my stories, but I could never decide whether or not I actually liked writing. I still can't decide, to be honest. I like thinking about my stories. I like planning out my stories in my head. I like reading over my stories after I've written them. But the actual act of writing itself has always been a love-hate relationship. Some days I can get into a good rhythm and have fun writing, but more often I find it painful--it's hard to focus myself, it's hard to translate what's in my head into words, and it takes so long.
Plus, there's all the self-doubt that always comes with writing. Whenever a story is in your head, it's still in a pure and wonderful form. Whenever you translate it into written words, then you immediately start criticizing yourself--is that any good? Does that make sense? Would another person want to read that? Maybe my story isn't so good after all?
All of which is to say: I've never quite made up my mind whether I actually like writing stories, or whether I just like the idea of writing stories.
This was a question that used to bother me as a kid, but as a kid I assumed that it would be something I would naturally sort out once I reached adulthood. Now, here I am in my 40s, and I still find myself wondering whether or not I actually like writing stories.
My history as a writer (such as it is) is as follows:
My second grade teacher was very encouraging of me, and often praised my stories in her class. (This story in particular). This gave me the self-image of a writer for many years afterwards--even though no subsequent teacher of mine was ever so impressed. Indeed, the older I got, the less praise I got from my writing teachers. By high school, I noticed that it was other students who the teachers were singling out for praise and encouraging to keep writing. My stories only got criticism.
This was discouraging of course. And it was the seeds of doubt that began to grow more and more as time went on. But at the same time, by this point I had carried along a self-image of a writer all through childhood, and it was not something to be overturned so easily.
I told myself that the reason my high school teachers couldn't appreciate my writing is because my writing style didn't match the assignment criteria. We were always assigned to write short stories in high school, and I could never think in short stories. All the stories I imagined were always sprawling long epics about huge wars or long journeys. I couldn't write short stories, and I knew it. But if my high school teachers could see the longer stories that I was working on at home, maybe they would be more impressed by that. (This was a tentative belief even at the time--even as a high school student I had doubts about how good my stories were. But it was at least a slight hope.)
All through childhood, ever since second grade, I was always always in the act of writing down some story or other.
Several years ago, I posted the surviving stories (the stories that hadn't gotten thrown out or lost over the years) on a blog: http://literaryendeavors.blogspot.com/ There are a handful more stories from my childhood that I can remember that didn't survive the test of time, and I wrote about them in my addendum "The Lost Works". But there's even more stories that I can't remember--or can only remember only in the vaguest of terms. Most of these stories I would spend several days thinking about, attempt to write a few pages, get discouraged when the writing wasn't going very well, and then switch to something else.
(Around the ages of 11 and 12, during the long summer vacations from school, I used to wander up and down our yard on summer afternoons, imagining stories that I believed I would get around to writing later. My mother used to see me outside daydreaming, believe I was bored and in need of occupation, and would offer me chores.)
The story I spent the most time on between 4th and 5th grade was Smart Wolves, which unfortunately I didn't save. But I do have a lot of memories of working on it. Many of my memories was, once again, about the disconnect between thinking about the story and planning the story. I would spend all day at school thinking about all the things I wanted to write in my story, but then find when I got home from school that I usually lacked the self-discipline to get more than a few words down. In the end, I never finished the story.
All through middle school, I started a bunch of stories, but never finished anything.
In high school, however, I developed the self-discipline to stick with one story over a long period of time.
Throughout my high school years, I spent my time working on an epic fantasy/Sci-Fi story. This I've also posted on a blog several years ago: http://fabulaestory.blogspot.com/
It's actually about 5 different stories that evolved during the writing. I made some attempt to explain my writing process and thought process that lead to the very convoluted plot in a series of posts here. But what was notable for me is that I stuck with it all the way through high school.
Of course, I had the usual struggles with forcing myself to write. I made a rule that I had to type ten lines of text every day. (By this point, personal computers had become affordable, and our family had a computer that I could write the story on--which also helped me stick with.) Those ten lines were usually a struggle for me to get through--it was difficult to force myself to sit at the computer to write, and then, once there it was difficult to get ten lines. Once I finally got to ten lines, I would breathe a sigh of relief, and promptly get off the computer and go do something else.
(I was fortunate in that the Internet didn't exist back then. If I had had the modern Internet back then, I believe I probably would have turned on the computer with the intention of writing something, then gotten distracted by Youtube videos, and then 2 hours later turned off the computer having gotten nothing accomplished. I can barely manage the distractions of the Internet now at my age--what chance would I have had at 14?)
There were also several times over high school when I got out of my habit of writing 10 lines a day, and didn't write anything for months at a time. But then, sooner or later, I would get back into it and attempt to resume my 10 lines a day.
As I grew slightly older, I found I was able to increase to a page a day. And summer vacation between 11th and 12th grade, I was able to crank out 4 pages a day.
I'm not sure why I could do 4 pages when previously 10 lines had been a struggle. My best guess is that I was training for cross-country that summer, and doing 10 mile runs every day, and I think getting a nice long run in during the morning helped to focus me in the afternoon. For whatever reason. I should also mention that most of my peers had summer jobs by this age, but I had failed to find employment, so I used my time on the story.
The following summer (between graduating high school and starting college), I worked at a grocery store stocking the shelves. It was excruciatingly boring work, and I remember I used to occupy my thoughts during the day by thinking about all the great things I would write in my story once I got home. I promised myself that I would spend my entire evening writing, but then, when I got home, I would usually find myself unable to sit down and write for any length of time.
And yet, in spite of all that, in spite of how hard it was to force myself to write, and how I often hated doing it, I have fond memories of that story. I am old enough now that I can see all its faults, but I still remember how excited I was to create it at the time. I remember how excited I used to get thinking about the big plot twists I had coming, or the even greater feeling of excitement that I would get when I discovered the big plot twists as I was writing. Sometimes I would think the story was going in one direction, and then as I was at the keyboard suddenly realize I wanted to take it in another direction.
...of course, it's those very moments--the sudden shifts in plot--that make the thing unreadable to anyone else (among other literary failings). But I really liked the idea of a story that could take some interesting twists and turns, and I have good memories of it.
While I was writing the story, I had the usual ups and downs in confidence that all writers feel. At times, I felt that what I was writing wasn't any good, and that nobody else would want to read it, and that I was only writing for my own amusement. And at other times, I felt certain that I was writing a work of genius, and that if my high school teachers could only see what epic heights I was capable of writing, they would take back all their criticisms of my short stories.
I never did get any outside opinions on the story, because no one else ever read it at that time, The only one who ever expressed any interest in reading the story was my mother, but I didn't want to let her read it because I knew she wouldn't approve of some of the language/violence. So all throughout high school, the story was only for my amusement alone. In 2004, I posted the stories on the blog, but to the best of my knowledge, no one has ever read it. (I think a couple of people tried, but couldn't get through more than the first couple pages. And I don't blame them.)
Now that I have the distance of time, and can evaluate my story more objectively, I can see for myself that it's not great. It's definitely nothing praise worthy. I was definitely never one of those teenage geniuses who could write an actual novel in their teens. Nor would I ever have won any writing awards.
But a question I find harder to answer is--is it any good at all? Was there potential? I'm not sure how good it is comparatively to what's expected at that age. (Someone who teaches high school English would have to answer that for me.) I wonder (I have always wondered) if there was any sliver of talent in my high school writing--for example, if I had chosen to pursue writing in college instead of to pursue socializing instead, could I eventually have developed into a half-decent fiction writer? Here, I must admit, that not even the distance of time can give me the objectivity to evaluate what potential I might or might not have had. I suspect it's pretty bad even by the standards of high schoolers, and that I never had any talent to begin with, but... I'm not sure.
Of course, it's all a moot question really, isn't it? Because even if you are a genuinely talented writer, the chances of getting a fiction book published are like winning the lottery. And even then, transitioning from the occasional book to making it as a professional full-time author is even more unlikely. (See this post HERE.)
This is something no one ever tells you when you're in school, of course. In school you're told that you can do anything, and that being an author is just as valid a career path as being a doctor or an engineer. But it's something I gradually figured out in my 20s (mostly just by reading posts and stuff on the Internet.)
And yet...and yet despite knowing all of this, I still find myself wondering sometimes if I could have made it with just a little bit more self-discipline or practice. When I catch myself thinking these things, I just have to remind myself that sometimes it's very hard to deprogram yourself from what you were taught in childhood.
But to continue the story of how I abandoned writing to focus on socializing:
I was still working on the story when I started college, and I even continued writing the story during my first week in the college dorms. But then I soon gave it up.
I was 18, and had been an introvert and a geek all of my life, and I was now at a stage in my life where I was feeling guilty about having been an introvert and a geek all through high school. (Once again, I acknowledge I am not unique. I think it is common for people who were introverts or geeks in high school to attempt to re-invent themselves in college.)
With these new found priorities, I began to retrospectively see the fact that I had spent my evenings in high school staying in and working on my story as something to be ashamed of, rather than proud of. I should have been out socializing, having adventures, building memories, meeting girls, etc. (The fact that I had no confidence talking to girls was, I told myself, partly a consequence of the fact that I never attempted to practice it.)
In the college dormitories there was always social interaction going on. So I ditched my story and tried to concentrate on socializing full time in college.
In the back of my mind, though, I kept thinking about the story.
Without getting into all the convoluted plot twists of my high school story, I stopped writing it just as the main characters were involved in an epic war. In my mind, however, I had already planned out several stories in advance. They would win the war, and set up a new regime. But then (over the course of several more stories), their children would become dissatisfied with the regime, and eventually rebel against them.
I was 18, so stories of youthful rebellion appealed to me. I had it all planned out in my head, even though I never wrote a word of it.
That unwritten story still occupied my thoughts when I was 22, and one afternoon, when listening to a rock album, I felt the story crystalize in my head. Except it wouldn't take place in the same fantasy world as my old story. It would take place in some fictional 19th Century European Country, and it would be about barricades, and revolution, and generational conflict, and religion, and Marx, and Jesus.
The story I was visualizing in my head seemed so great that I felt that I had to write it. Even though I knew it would pull me away from the socializing that I had decided was my priority. A story this epic just had to be written.
I had some misgivings about it even at the time, of course. The biggest misgiving was that I knew myself well enough to know that the most likely outcome for this story was that I was going to get halfway done with it and then give up. The story was large enough in scope that it would take a lot of time to get through. (And, indeed, this is what ended up happening.)
Looking back now, the big problem with this story is that it was incredibly pretentious. How presumptuous to think that I would have anything intelligent to say about Jesus or Marx? (Indeed, this level of pretentiousness is probably more excusable at 18 than at 22. In other words, I was probably at an age where I should have known better. Or at least I would have been if I had been anyone else. But I have always been a bit slow to mature, and have always been slightly immature for my age.)
But at the time, this was only a minor concern of mine. It crossed my mind a few times as I wrote, but I preferred to allow my feelings of optimism and enthusiasm wash the doubts away.
As far as memory serves, I actually made good progress on this story. No more forcing myself to write a meager 10 lines a day--now I was writing for longer periods and more frequently. (I was often on a computer writing this story, and when I was away from a computer I was working on it in a notebook.)
And this story, unlike my high school stories, was not just going to sit unread on my computer. This story I had ambitions for.
Exactly what those ambitions were varied from day to day. Some days, I thought it would be enough just to share this story with friends and family. It might not be good for publication, but it would still be an epic story that would not disappoint those I shared it with.
But on other days, I was sure I was writing something that could be published. And not only published, but something that could make me famous--something that could become a new classic.
I've since posted that story here: http://workingtittle.blogspot.com/
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