Sealed Documents

It’s been about 17 years since I’ve started writing with the intent to publish. I had spurts of moments before where I’d take a school task and abuse it so that I could have people listen to whatever idiotic story I wrote. Those times were fun, however I wouldn’t ever call the things that I produced back then anything but simple time wasters. They weren’t exactly well written, and I struggled a lot with making them read well.

The first short story I ever wrote, survived about 24 hours on DeviantArt before ultimately getting deleted by me. I got cold feet, but looking back, whatever I wrote still lingers in my mind as being ‘absolute horrid’. I think I can say it with confidence that it was in the best interest of all of us that it got wiped off the face of the earth.

I kept trying my hand at writing stories, but I just couldn’t get it right, I had no style, no voice and as such whatever I came up with felt like utter garbage. So I did the next best thing and started writing screenplays. This surprisingly led me back to the same path a couple of years later, when through random chance, I ended up studying abroad. During this time, I had a great teacher who didn’t push her own agenda onto me, and let me thrive, instead leading me towards the path of self discovery.

“I’m not going to tell you how or what to write, I’m just going to tell if you a story makes sense or not.”

I think she said something among those lines. The gist of it was, that you didn’t need to conform to anything (especially not towards ‘The Hero’s Journey), as long as your audience understood the core concepts of your work. Anyone who takes a glance at your creation, should be able to get whatever you’re trying to say, even if takes them some time to figure that out for themselves.

This and the time spent with said teacher has left a deep impression on me and forever changed the way I tackle anything in life. I still remember handing in a script for review, which she said that she didn’t like, because the events were too dark for her, but she understood where I was coming from. She gave me some advice on how to touch it up, but also remarked that I should be the one making the final decision, since it was my story. Needles to say, I’ve never met a single person in life aside her who was not only honest about my work, provided actual useful advice, yet gave me the leeway to end up with whatever I wanted to.

This might not seem much, but it is an extremely uplifting thing to happen that can trigger an explosion of creative freedom in oneself. I cannot stress how important her words, or rather her whole attitude was towards students. Having only ever heard rejections and instructions that had to be followed down to the tiniest detail, this was a complete shock to my system. But in a good way of course.

We were provided with a number of writing prompts that were to help us express ourselves more. I’ve recently re-read the the very first one we did, and was surprised at how well it flows. There were only a couple of grammatical mistakes I had to correct and about a sentence or two that had to be slapped in for added details. This will be available soon, here.

I continued looking through my folders, and while I did not find everything from this era, I did stumble upon the third one I wrote.

It was garbage.

I can tell I had a vague idea on what I wanted, but the execution was very bland and boring. In fact, I don’t think it’s something that’s remotely usable at all. Even with a rewrite, I would have to scrap most of the contents, which frankly isn’t worth it. But that just shows that despite me suddenly attaining a set of magical wings of prose does not instantly equal perfection upon everything.

Some things you make are great, but other’s are just as bad as your first attempts. You can lose motivation, suffer from burnout or simply not feel whatever you need to feel at a given moment and so thing don’t work out in the end. It happens, there’s no need to worry about it. The only thing that changes with the passing years is your own judgement, so you can spot problems a lot faster and deal with them a lot easier than before.

Still, none of this can happen if you don’t start somewhere. If you want to write, write. If you want to paint, paint. Thinking about the things you want to do won’t get you anywhere. I think there used to be a saying that in order for a person to succeed, they need to fail first. This sounds awful, but it’s the truth.