Learning Curve

High School, am I right? I had all kinds of projects running all over the place. Only a few of them stayed with me. One in particular was a series that I had developed over a year or so after an assignment from my Creative Writing class. I’ll get to the project in a minute, but first I want to talk about some of the classes I took.

Arguably the most important was Creative Writing, which was led by Mrs. Vaughn - who was one of the most kind teachers I’d ever had and truly helped me foster my talent. She was a preacher’s wife and regularly put on get-togethers at her church for teenagers. I attended one once and appreciated what she was trying to do (create a controlled party in a town of 16,000 people - that’s right, we lived in Footloose), but it wasn’t for me.

This class was a throw away for most of the students who took it, which was fine by me. The class was 50 minutes of writing, three times a week. The fourth day, we would trade projects with someone else and read over their work. The fifth day, we  would each read one of our projects out loud. We had to turn in three projects a week, and between the three projects there had to be a total of seven pages.

The projects were mostly free style, but offered bonus points if you followed certain writing prompts facilitated by Mrs. Vaughn. I took advantage of these as often as I could, which was usually only once a week. More about these prompts later.

Weekly, I wrote a “What if?” journal that centered around our school being infested with a zombie plague. The school had weird railways and caves underneath it (in the story), that caused some of the students to split up. It was the first “on-going” project I ever took on, and it was the one I read to the class every week (this also saved several other students from reading theirs, which they thanked me for).

The next two classes were AP (Advanced Placement for those folks who haven’t been in High School for a while) Literature and Mythology. Mythology was a bit more hands on, like a traditional class, and helped me grasp a lot of the symbolism and writing formats. This is where I started really hammering down the Eragon impersonation, because we talked a lot about the Hero’s Cycle and Joseph Campbell in general. My teacher, unknowingly, opened a can of worms by using Star Wars as a comparison.

AP Lit was a similar format to Creative Writing, but instead of writing, it was 50 minutes of reading. We had a list of books we had to read, and turn in a report weekly on one of the books we’d finished. Once a month we would have a quiz on one of the required books.

So these classes, along with some others, like Speech, were really helpful for me and helped set the pace for what I wanted to do. It also provided me with a stable foundation for my future in writing.

One of the writing prompts from Creative Writing happened to be ‘rewrite your favorite story in a different genre’. My mind exploded, and I started writing down as many things as I could think of. The first one was Lord of the Rings as space opera. I fleshed out this galaxy where all the different planets in the galaxy were the different races and nations from Middle Earth and a humble delivery pilot came across something from ages past and had to take it to the other side of the galaxy to destroy it.

That was how the idea came to me. Admittedly, most of that idea had been laid by Tolkien decades ago. I filled half a notebook with ideas and notes and how to change this or tackle that (Gollum was a bounty hunter). Eventually it seemed much too big for me. So instead of writing it, it became a Dungeons & Dragons campaign I ran for my friends.

The second idea was a contemporary Harry Potter, without magic. I filled several notebooks about the details. I set it in a modern American boarding school. The story kept leaning slightly towards science fiction the more I thought about it.  Instead of filling the plot holes with magic I used fringe science. Eventually, it became a massive four (or five, never nailed it down) book series about clones and corporate espionage. It was awesome.

In my files I kept calling it The St. Howards Project, meaning to give it a proper name. St. Howards being the name of the school that served as my Hogwarts. When I finished writing the first book, I actually printed some copies and gave them to family and friends (thanks, Amazon). To my surprise, most of my family enjoyed it. Yeah, some of them may have sugar coated what they thought, but years later some of them even reminded me about a particularly scene they enjoyed.

But I didn’t enjoy it.

A tickle in the back of my head reminded me that, at its foundation, this was Harry Potter, and many of the themes echoed that, like “choosing between what’s right and what’s easy”. So I tore it apart. It would be the first iteration of The St. Howards Project that got tossed.

A New Story

When I started High School my writing really ramped up; by the end of 2003 I had a computer that was on a white plastic fold out table. This was a weird piece of time in the world of technology because I had a computer in my bedroom, but not my own cell phone - and cell phones were still just “cell phones” and not mini-computers for your pocket.

In August of 2003 my life changed. A fantasy book that took the world by storm came in and crashed into my lap. Eragon was written by someone who was 15. Just like me, but this kid had been lucky enough to have a family who had made their own publishing company to support his ideas and stories. On top of that he had been lucky enough to have his book picked up by someone in the industry. Paolini became my hero.

This invigorated me.

Secretly, I was most impressed with the fact that Eragon is just a manuscript for A New Hope with some words changed. “The Force” was magic, and “Jedi” were Dragon Riders. But other than those few colloquialisms, it was identical.

I don’t remember how it happened, or what exactly the plan was, but during my freshman year in high school I started writing notes here and there about a story that was similar but different enough from Pendragon, which I had fallen hard for. It was slightly more mature than MacHale’s piece and explored one of the aspects of Pendragon that I wasn’t super thrilled with: the cap of design.

Pendragon explores a cool concept of multiple dimensions that aren’t all “dimensions” in the traditional sense. Instead, some of them are just different times of the same (for example, the modern world is “Second Earth” while “First Earth” is the 1930’s), and the other dimensions are really quite simplified caricatures of worlds (one of them is a world where there is only one city and the rest of the planet is covered in water and people live on large barges or various other floatable structures).

My problem with that, at first, was that there are only 10 of these dimensions. As a freshman in high school, I was mad at this design - I thought it was too narrow and was writing yourself into a corner by limiting the number of places you could explore, the number of different things you could see or experience and the number of people you could meet.

So what I wrote was about multiple dimensions, a little bit more sci-fi than MacHale, and explored more of the “infinite possibilities” idea. I read books on String Theory, and a few different things about infinite dimensions based on choices. I made sure that the actual writing was very different from my beloved story so that I didn’t run into the same problem that my mother had pointed out previously.

I had no idea about marketing, target audience, etc. at the time but looking back it would’ve been aimed more towards adults. It took me about 7 months to finish the manuscript, and then I was stuck. I had no idea what to do so I went online to look at what others were doing and learned a little about beta readers. What I didn’t know about was the editing. So I sent it to beta readers who looked at it and either immediately quit, or sent back so many fixes that I got demoralized.

Maybe demoralized isn’t the right word, perhaps confused. I thought I had covered a lot of bases but didn’t realize how much work editing actually is part of writing. I tried many times to polish that piece of work, but eventually I put it on the shelf and moved on (I don’t remember quite how long that took me to do, because every time I tried I would fix a little bit more and a little bit more).

So, I tried again.

The second time I aimed a bit smaller and started writing a novella. I had no ambition for this one, it was going to be pure practice for me. In school we were getting deep into the Revolutionary War, so it was a fantasy-set reinterpretation of that. A Kingdom began exploring and found a colony, sent people to live there, claimed the land, etc. and eventually they rose up and claimed the colony away from the Kingdom.

I don’t think I ever finished that one because I realized I hadn’t read enough fantasy to figure out many of the nooks and crannies that genre has (and it has a lot of them). I had read Lord of the Rings and some of Chronicles of Narnia (The Magician’s Nephew and The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe I’d finished, I’d started reading The Horse and his Boy and, damn, that story is flat and boring) but that was the extent of it.

By the time I had finished my third manuscript, I was a junior in high school. My parents had started to notice this was more than just a passing fad for me, and so started talking to me about it. But I didn’t know how to talk about it. I didn’t know what it meant to be an author, or about what that entailed..

Around that time, my father took me to St. Louis for a day (a two and a half hour drive from my hometown) for a seminar. I’m pretty sure it was called the Writer’s Guild Conference, but I don’t have any paperwork or memorabilia from the event. I attended, took notes, talked to some people. I was the youngest person there (by a surprising margin) and that was a big deal. At the beginning of the conference I was brought up to the front of the podium and was introduced to every attendee, it felt like being a prize dog on display.

Don’t get me wrong, at the time it was super exciting that they were making those kinds of waves for me (it still feels nice) but I don’t think it was necessary or benefited me in any way other than slightly boosting my ego (this was countered with the embarrassment I was left with).

I’m going to breakdown the advice I received at the conference about getting published:

1. Be honest about your writing.
2. Have thick skin and learn to write alternatives on your feet when receiving feedback.
3. Learn whether you're a planner or a write-by-your-pants writer. Either works but be honest about where you fit in the spectrum.
4. Develop relationships with industry people.

Some of this might seem obvious, and number 4 might seem unfair but that’s the way the world is. People in the industry like people in the industry. This is true, though, for any industry. Breaking into an industry can be somewhat difficult, and so knowing people and having a relationship with them can be super helpful.

Hello World...

In 1999 or 2000, when I was in 5th grade, I was given a project to write a story that reinterpreted another story that my classmates may not know. At the time I attended a Catholic school in the town next to where I lived. I didn't see many of my classmates recreationally and so I didn't know what many of them liked or disliked.

I decided  I would rewrite the first few episodes of “Digimon”, an anime I was into at the time, and condense a lot of it. Back then, I considered this filler. It didn’t really fall into character or plot development, but was integral to setting the show up. Most people now refer to this as ‘monster of the week’. I remember being very proud of it at the time; I had implemented a better structure for character development (something that show took 8 or so episodes to do, I did in 12 pages of 12 point Times New Roman).

The last thing I remember about this story was that when I showed it to my mother who was on the phone with someone and said it was cute. She then proceeded to tell her friend that it was plagiarism. It broke my heart when she said that,  I was truly upset that she didn’t quite get the project. But I instantly settled on that I had one goal: write better.

The problem with wanting to write and not liking to read is pretty self evident. At the time of writing that plagiarized little story was that I didn't like to read. But I started to. I read kids adventure books and comic books. I never really, truly found my reading groove until my family took a New Years vacation to San Francisco in December 2002, when I was in 8th grade. Though most of this story takes place in early 2003.

We stayed at an awesome hotel called the Sir Francis Drake. There were a handful of things I remember about that trip. The first was that I sat in the closet on the cell phone talking to my, at the time, girlfriend. This is important because when I was in 8th grade I didn't have a cell phone, our family did. And it was really my father's and he let us use it sometimes.

The other thing I remember was being in my first large book store. Where I lived there was only a small Waldenbooks in the mall. Not an anchor store, mind you, a store that was just a bit larger than a GameStop. A few towns away was a Barnes & Noble, and it was large but not huge. This Barnes & Noble in San Francisco was two floors with an escalator. That was a big deal. My father wanted me to find something to read there so that I had something to do while they had a fancy dinner. I came across a book with a mysterious door and a teenage boy on the cover called “Pendragon: Merchant of Death”. I picked it up and read the back and it called to me on a deep level. Next to it I noticed a stack of the sequel “The Lost City of Faar”, which sounded like an Atlantis story which deeply interested me at the time. I asked my father and he said I could only get one because I wouldn't have time to read the other. I assured him that I would, and eventually I got the go ahead.

The last little bit I remember about this trip (I think this happened BEFORE the trip to Barnes & Noble but I'm not 100% sure) was that I bought music for the first time. I'd gotten CDs as gifts, and listened to the radio and all of that was fine because I didn't really have a taste for music. But we visited a mall for my mother and I found an F.Y.E. and purchased a copy of Linkin Park’s ‘Hybrid Theory’.

I didn't finish “The Lost City of Faar” until we were on the plane back home, but it was the fastest I'd ever read any book. I kept up to date with the series, and in May when the third book came out I was prepared. I bugged the Waldenbooks about it several times, enough that when I asked if they were doing a midnight release (this was all the rage back then) they told me if I came in after close they'd give it to me. I hope I don't get anyone in trouble but I’m pretty sure Waldenbooks closed their doors in 2011.