The origins of my passion

A personal anniversary is on the horizon, so to get ready I thought I’d commemorate the occasion by reminiscing on how I went from “struggling to hold a pencil” bad to “Shakespeare School of Literacy” decent at writing. Bear with me folks, because the path is a long and winding road with unpredictable twists and turns that won’t make sense unless you’re paying attention. So do pay attention; there’s a test at the end.

Before we begin let’s get confusing. Although I acknowledge the general start of this writing journey as October 2013, the closest I ever got to writing would be in July 2012, and my familiarity with programs like Microsoft Word precede that even by a few years as schooling in the 2000s saw the potential of computers in class and wanted to start us early on those Mac desktops.

These things were everywhere when I was 8.

Writing falls under the umbrella of creativity, so something needed to inspire the writing journey, right? Right! And where was the inspiration? Lego bricks. The building blocks made about 40% of my childhood, with the others being video games and the playground. During one summer a friend and I were playing with the Legos I had set up on the coffee table. At the same time, I was a big consumer of stop-motion videos on YouTube and was momentarily part of that brickfilming community myself.

For those unaware brickfilming is a subset of stop-motion that in any capacity makes use of Lego bricks for set pieces, actions, scenes or what not. There have been several over the years, but a pioneer in the concept is Australian filmmaker Lindsay Fleay who between 1985 and 1989 made one of the first brickfilms: The Magic Portal.

Despite the huge production time, it still only clocked in at around 16 minutes, with subsequent brickfilmers over the years making longer films in even less time assuming no technical difficulties are around to ruin anything. A quick Google search and the Wikipedia page for brickfilming will tell you that Lego had long seen this potential and are said to have started this themselves as early as the 1960s, though feature length films made entirely or partly through stop-motion.

For the connection to my writing, it was my intense viewership of brickfilmers on YouTube, some of which included custom-made Brick Arms (some of which I had myself), or plastic molded to the shape of any given gun or sword that can be made that gave me an idea to try animation in June 2012. I saw a moderate amount of success for a beginning YouTuber at the time, though other responsibilities kept me away from my makeshift film sets. After Christmas Eve 2012, I tried to keep it going but with New Years’ Day 2013 walking away and high school proving more important, there was just no way.

Still, the interest in animation, tedious and meticulous as it was, was there. Most importantly, the storytelling element was what I remembered the most. I had made a minifigure, or Lego figure, that I’d gotten somewhat (read: quite) attached to. I made it with one of the blue leg pieces, a trench torso piece, a black scruffy hair piece, and one of the heads with the angry-looking face, but wearing orange-tinted shades. If I were to draw him again today, he’d be drawn with blue jeans, a light blue dress shirt under a blue overcoat, messy black hair and the same light orange-tinted shades. If that description makes you think of an underlying symbolism of any kind, try not to overthink it. Keep in mind that, this character was designed when I was around 13 or 14 between middle school and high school, so there might not have even been a real meaning other than, “it looked cool.”

Not this intense or exaggerated, but around a halfway point of sorts. When it came to developing him further, writing was amateurish and my taste for the craft was underdeveloped at the time. Being inexperienced here, I dove headfirst by putting it all in a notebook that I wasn’t using for anything important. I’ve gone through many of those, occasionally scribbling in the blank pages and whatnot. The earliest form of this story I have in print isn’t exactly the earliest form of the story as a concept.

As time went on, and I started to write more for my English and history classes (projects, reports, and essays, etc.), I’d begun to learn more about themes and motifs and other terms to help craft better versions of the story about the man in the orange-tinted shades. Between 2014 and around 2019, I’d written and rewritten this manuscript, with each successive manuscript getting longer and more complex than the last, developing a more mature tone over time.

Through all of that, I’m glad to say that the latest version of the story is arguably the best version I have of it. Subsequent manuscripts of mine would also go through rewrites and edits of their own, although not as many as the first one, not for so long, and partly due to technical issues with aging computers and/or computer components.

Fortunately, Microsoft’s good idea fairy had a “lightning in a bottle” idea, and made Microsoft Office available on mobile. So if you trust OneDrive enough to try your clothes on only once, you can craft a chapter or two on your laptop/desktop, and when duties pull you elsewhere, you can add more to the manuscript on a mobile device that allows for it. Personally, I favor phones over tablets, but my experiences writing more than YouTube comments and text messages with my giant hands make it somewhat unbearable. I don’t really like tablets all that much, but if I had one on hand and some time to kill in between other responsibilities, I could edit and add some more to the manuscript and then when it syncs up with what’s on the real computer, it’ll add that and I can continue with no serious issues.

Creativity was often the barrier, which just seems like the typical creative person thing to say for why I do or don’t do X, but it’s true. Those of you who can’t see yourself as an artist or painter or musician, etc. creativity comes whenever. It’s like dealing with a spontaneous cat; you never know when it will greet you, but you’re delighted when it does and you want your time with it to be meaningful before your train of thought derails.

Art doesn’t march to a schedule it comes whenever and goes whenever. Sometimes the sparks start a fire, other times it doesn’t and like a pyromaniac, you want to make use of that fire before it gets put out or burns out. Inspiration also plays a major part in creativity. Find any modern artist and they’ll list off influences, many of those influences, if they’re still around, will list influences of their own and then some.

For me, the tenth grade was a turning point in my writing journey. Part of the inspiration came from some of the books we read and class and had at the time, it was clear that I had a certain preference. Of all the books to introduce me to the coming-of-age genre, I would’ve preferred anything else besides J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. Short rant: Holden Caulfield is a [donkey noises]. Fortunately for me, I got a better showing of the genre in Stephen King’s novella Stand By Me. Matter of fact, this and select others were how King became one of my favorite authors.

At the same time, during a reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, my tenth grade English teacher assigned us to write a short snippet in either the point of view of an existing character or we could make one up. I chose the latter, creating and writing from the POV of a performer in Jay Gatsby’s mansion. This was the paper that netted me an A+ in that class and admittedly I didn’t move on from that for a while. I’m tempted to say I never did as of writing this. Although I was never a bad student, my teachers always wanted me to shoot for the stars, but I kept dragging my heels while the more analytic brainiacs in math and science thrived. But this was where I was encouraged to let my creative side go nuts, so I did. As another humblebrag, I did exceptionally well in my art class, hardly ever dipping below a solid A+. The conclusion to draw from that is structured tutorials are a limiter for me, but with a green light and the simple words “The sky’s the limit,” nothing is gonna stop me from channeling my inner Claude Monet.

Honestly, I’m more of a Van Gogh kind of guy.

From around 2015 to the modern day, I just kept on writing and rewriting those manuscripts. For the first one about the orange shades guy, with help from family, I had it copyrighted in 2018. All that was left was to edit and find a publisher. The publisher proved to be quite tricky. In general, you’re not supposed to pay the publisher; that’s a scam. The author gets 7/10 of the royalties and the publisher gets the rest. I do have dreams one day that the manuscripts graduate from file to physical book on a shelf, even now as I draft a potential fourth draft while editing the third one.

This method of mine is probably not unheard of. Stephen King is so prolific, that if he spits it’s a bestseller slated to receive its film adaptation in the next three years or so. And the olden days where books could serve as a writer’s sole source of income probably needed to be written with the speed of Barry Allen. Fame and fortune not guaranteed while the author is still alive, but at least Poe and Lovecraft have their appropriate credits.

Towards the end of college, and even now, I’d been looking at a variety of outlets that have a strong writing market. For the anniversary of this blog, I plan on giving a sneak peek of a blog I had on Blogger from February to December of 2021 with a brief hiatus in between because I was in the Army. As a mild spoiler, it… went off the rails and no one can be bothered to clear the debris.