I think I’ve been mushing words together since I was 12. I’m now coming up to 25, so that’s half my life I’ve spent making stuff up. So here I am, starting up a blog about my literary adventures in the hopes of being more serious about writing. Welcome! Come with me to a world of pure imagination…
Children have a wonderfully uninhibited imagination and I think that’s one of the things I’ve tried to keep as a writer. Playing with Lego turned to playing the Sims, then into imaginary conversations with characters from books I’d read, and has now evolved into creating my own characters to have imaginary conversations with. I used to create short scenarios to act out with my toys, then I started applying the ideas of plot and continuity, until I got to message-board role playing. I think it was then that I really got into writing.
I had to look up the exact name for this concept, but the setup is fairly simple: you and a friend are part of the same messaging board or forum and decide to write a story. You spin up a character, they spin up a character, and someone starts with something like ‘John was sitting in his office when he heard a loud crash’. And from then on the sky is the limit. Each turn can be as long or as short as needed, sometimes containing just one line from a dialog, and there was never an expectation for prose to be perfect. We wrote, hit ‘post’, and waited for the other person to reply. There would be multiple threads going on simultaneously with different character pairings (or even groups, if one of us decided to make it a party!) and there was never an actual idea of plot or genre or any direction: you went with whatever the story decided to be.
This went on for a good year or two starting when I was about 14. And let me tell you, I wrote a lot then. There was one particular story that started with two characters in a lift and about 200 pages later the amount of drama involved rivalled a telenovela (I’m talking stealing of babies and cheating and betrayal… Don’t judge!). Another one had accidental time travel back to prehistoric times and the resulting ‘accidental’ causing of mass extinction. It wasn’t all end-of-the-world drama. In fact, most of it was rambling and writing for the sake of ‘let’s see where this will take us’. But it allowed me to explore character interactions and development, numerous settings, and varying levels of description in writing.
These are all elements of a story that complement the plot and can take a piece of writing from ‘okay’ to ‘amazing’. I’ll probably spend a good long while talking about characters and character-driven plot later. The point is that writing so much gave me the chance to learn about writing simply by immersing myself in the act of it. It also allowed me to write lots and lots of crap. Hardly any of the writing I produced in that medium is in any way salvageable. However, that’s not the point. As the saying goes, you need to learn to walk before you can run, so that’s what I did. I wrote and wrote and wrote until I learned how to pick my words like ripe fruit from a tree, lay them out and turn them into sticky sweet jam. Of course, I don’t talk like this in everyday life.
In fact, in everyday life I found myself quite busy as school kept getting more demanding. Eventually, I started university and then a job, so there wasn’t much time to write. I’ve failed NaNoWriMo twice, so I didn’t even go for a third strike. Somehow I managed to finish a book and it only took me two years! Sadly, I’m not nearly as prolific as I used to be. I’ve kept on writing bits here and there and the words still try to burst out sometimes. I’ll talk about the habit of writing in the future, but for now I’d like to start blogging again. I look forward to sharing more adventures with you.