Sunday, March 16, 2014

On Writing Fiction: My Lifelong Mission

In 2008, I completed my first short story that I was actually somewhat proud of.  Unfortunately, shortly after completing it, I destroyed it.  As a young seventh grade twelve year old, I was very afraid of what people might think of my writing.  I wrote a story about superheros, a juvenile but fun subject.  I cannot remember what the main character's name was, but I do remember she had the power to control water.  She had a psychic sister and the duo went to a school that taught them to use their superpowers in the best way possible.  In the end, she and her classmates worked to save Times Square from dark forces that could only be stopped by their superpowers.  I worked very hard to come up with the characters and the plot and when I was inspired, I wrote.  I loved it.
Flash forward to 2010.  I tried to harness the power of the pen and write fiction again.  I decided I would try to start NaNoWriMo, also known as National Novel Writing Month.  It is an insane writing challenge that occurs every November where participants write fifty thousand words (an entire novel) in just thirty days.  I imagined a character and attempted to write about her.  Her name was Ginger and she had red hair and she was an outcast like my superhero with water powers.  I abandoned this project after less than a week and very few pages.
Flash forward again to 2014.  I am trying yet again to write fiction.  Unfortunately, I have such a hard time coming up with stories because all my characters end up the same.  They are outcasts that are introverted and very different from their peers.  They are all stuck in worlds that do not understand them.  Moreover, they are cursed with a creator that abandons them in these unwelcoming, fictional worlds.
This author, confused by the world around her, tries to reflect her views of it through her writing.  She attempts to recreate the world as she sees by putting these views into the first-person narratives she writes.  She sometimes gives them superpowers and other times she only gifts them with red hair.  Other times they remain nameless and are only featured in a simple paragraph that is eventually scrapped.
The only qualities that these characters have in common are that they are misunderstood and that their author quickly leaves them behind, moving onto different writing, whether it is academic, self-reflective, or in the form of meaningless tweets.
I have these ideas for characters that are based loosely on my life.  These characters are introverted outcasts.  Creative types with the dream to be understood, they are stuck in worlds where nobody understands them.  Neither the fictional world around them nor their reckless creator is able to give them the attention that they deserve.
So I as a writer promise myself and these abandoned characters that I will one day complete a finished fictional piece.  It will have an outcast character that is not understood, whether it is the main character or not, because it is the least my fictional muse babies deserve.  One day I will do it for you, you beautiful creations that have emerged forth from my wild mind.

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