When I knew I Loved to Write

Hello, my name is Phillip, and I'm a keyboarding teacher. I'm assigning blogging to my students as a project based assessment. We've spent two grading periods working on common grammatical errors as well as building speed and accuracy in typing. Now, they are going to be tasked with publishing an article a week while putting their keyboarding skills to work. They are able to choose the topic they blog about, and we are going to post their blog addresses in the hallway outside of our classroom. 

Their immediate audience will be their peers, but potentially, it will also be the world. Writing about something they feel passionate about, as well as having a global audience should raise the stakes for them. Hopefully, they will rise to the occasion and produce something through the writing process, that is worthy of public consumption. We shall see. 

In the spirit of leading by example, I will be writing about writing. 

I write for fun. I love telling stories. The moment of self realization, when I thought, "I'm a writer!" was not only freeing, but also shaping. Until that very moment I didn't really "know" what I wanted to be. I worked a mediocre job and made enough money to pay rent in an efficiency apartment. I didn't have cable. Most of my weeks were spent working a midnight shift as a police dispatcher. After 2 in the morning, when all the drunks had finally gotten home, this left lots of time to sit and read, think, and write. What was I writing back then: Dungeons and Dragons adventures. Lots of writing goes into successfully running a campaign. By trying to write better campaigns for my friends I was building tools for writing without even realizing it. My first audience was a small cadre of four or five friends. Some of them were just old enough not to need babysitters while others owned businesses or had full time jobs. They bought all the cokes and pizzas. 

I had to learn to world build. We didn't have much money so instead of buying published campaigns I had to write them myself. What kid of governments were in play? What kind of magic was available? What level of technology was available? You had to know the deities, the major factions, guilds, and social classes. Towns, forests, deserts, and caves all had personalities if they were worth adventuring in. 

I learned to build characters. The Dungeon Master (D.M.) has to consider what everything in the world is besides the player characters. Every shop owner, bad guy, guard, and victim must be described by the D.M. A good D.M. learns quickly that knowing what these people are ahead of time makes running the game go more smoothly. Now, there were tables you could roll against in order to come up with a random mix of personality traits. These kinds of characters could be entertaining but usually the were stiff. It was my privilege to create some motivated villains. I had to know why they wanted to do dastardly deeds. 

Writing role playing adventures was a strange kind of writing because you still had to weave an interesting chain of events with a beginning, middle, and end, but you controlled everything but the main characters. They have a will of their own in the players, which is why they are called player characters. This is what makes role playing games so rewarding as well as so frustrating. It was this frustration that made me realized that I was, at heart, a writer. 

I would weave this tale that would be so awesome if it only unfolded as I had intended. Then the players would react as they chose. Entire story lines had to be scraped in reaction to their choices. I would become disappointed but would trudge on. 

Other times, I got to play and would do the exact same thing to whoever was the D.M. that night. Whenever that D.M. would contrive events so that you had to choose the way they had intended you to, I realized that they were no longer running a role playing game, but they were instead telling us the story they had written. I resented them doing that and would say, "Then I no longer have free will." I'd drop my pencil and dice and tell them, "Go ahead and just tell us how this is going to end because now you're just storytelling." 

Shazam! I started to build worlds, colorful villains with real motivations, and heroes to battle them with. I got to put in all the traps, lies, and scenarios that they had to defeat in order to deserve to level up, change, and become more powerful and interesting. After that, I sought out writing contests and bulletin boards that accepted short stories and published adventures. My college major was declared as English with a minor in Communication. This is what I wanted to do from then on. 

I will alternate this blog between stories I've written, writing tips and tools I've picked up, and also memories about growing as a writer. 

Growing Up Drawing

My earliest memories include coloring in coloring books on a cement floor with my mother. She joked that art was the only subject she ever passed. She only went up through the sixth grade, but it wasn't her fault though. Her father owned a farm and seemed to only have children for free labor, so they were only allowed to attend school until the harvest came in. Then, they all had to work the farm. She is the source of all our talent if it can be arrived at genetically.

We were three brothers and our family only had me, I was told, because they were trying one more time for a girl. Poor mom. Luckily, she got to babysit my neighbor's daughter and several other little girls which she spoiled endlessly. Either way, the three of us were always drawing. We drew on brown grocery sacks. We'd cut it up and divide the flat spaces. Me being the youngest, and least talented, got the smallest pieces. Our mother would actually buy us coloring books, sketch pads, and art supplies but we would burn through it all.

Our father got a job working as the janitor for the petroleum plant after he worked there all day. We joined him there with our mother after school to help him finish more quickly. As payment, we were allowed to take the reams of reports they printed and threw away every day, and were allowed to eat the stale doughnuts that remained in the break room.  One side was alternating green and white bands and the other was large, wide, and plain white paper. We'd tear off the hole punched, perforated edges and we'd have stacks of fresh canvases for our work.

Whenever the school had art contests, first place was really only between our middle brother and I. Our oldest brother was four years older than me, but the middle brother was only one year older. We were very close and shared everything.  After elementary school, our talents diverged but were solidly founded in art.

The eldest fell in love with comic books at a very early age. Our father gifted him some G.I. Joe and Captain America comics he picked up from the 7-11 near our house. He had no idea what he had just done. My brother was given the first love of his life. My middle brother and I don't know when we started drawing because it had always been a part of our lives. No doubt, we just copied our big brother in pursuing his great love because he was cooler than us in everything he did. But for him, it was this moment. Eventually he could draw just like they did in the comics. He left home after high school to attend a commercial art school in Arizona and came back being able to do caricatures of people. 

My middle brother fell in love with painting. He favored realism above all else. He could take a photograph or the cover of Sports Illustrated and turn it into a painting. He was equally skilled with colored pencils, watercolors, gouache, and oil. The man was a genius with paint. When I got married his wedding gift was a painting I commissioned. He made me two silver reflective dolphins playfully swimming through the cosmos together very close to each other. That painting will always hang above our bed, so I see it and think of him every single day.

I fell in love with reading and writing. The novels I read were always imagined in my mind like a comic book. I wouldn't envision real life players on a stage usually. I'd imagine how the images were rendered on a movie screen, animated film, or a comic book. I imagined them as Dungeons and Dragons adventures. I quit drawing, never having attained either of my brother's level of skill, but continued to read and eventually write.

Now, my eldest brother and I are collaborating on a comic book. It's historical fiction with a sprinkle of magic thrown in. That's all I will say for now though. I actually find myself writing in my mind throughout the day. I put myself in the frame of mind of one of my characters and put them through scenarios. It's important for the characters to live and breathe naturally. By the time I put a character's first line of dialogue or action to print, I've observed a good portion of these character's lives before the story. It helps in making them react organically and believably. My limited drawing talent can be brought to bear drawing thumbnails for the sequences I'm describing in my scripts for my brother. It's no where near as good as what they could do, but it's enough to convey action, position, and emotion.