Writing

My World

        School has never been my cup of tea.  It seems to require a very specific combination of special information and skills that I simply do not possess.  My mind is a mirage of thoughts like: “maybe if I were more confident,” “maybe if I could just talk with them,” “maybe if I wasn’t so inherently awkward.”  Somewhere in me logic is stifling a laugh and muttering “you don’t fit in because you’re that weird chick who is constantly reading a novel, you talk about comic books, and your social etiquette is lacking on the best of days.”  And so, for me, I spend my seven institutionalized hours a day sitting in various, equally hideous rooms, making no noise and pretending I’m not there.

        This quiet, mild-mannered, painfully shy girl disappears once I have sat down on my bed, laptop on my legs, fingers hovering above the keys.  I slowly transition from the trauma of another day wasted to the places that is entirely mine.  As I put in my earbuds and select the playlist titled “Imogen” or “Cove” I find my paradise.  The carefully compiled sets of songs that I feel represent the chosen character wash over me and my muscles start to act involuntarily, striking the keys with purpose and dedication, words flowing onto the page.

        As my thoughts end up appearing sentence by sentence in front of me I frequently pause to flip frantically through notebooks filled with character analyses, tentative plot outlines, diagrams that at one point meant something, before I find the scribbled memo I was in search of.  In this way my novel takes form.  It’s a long, arduous, and all over frustrating process.  As I write words, decide they sound wrong, delete, start over, realize I’ve made the scene worse than it was the first time, try again, find out three times is not the charm, get fed up, go make myself a fresh cup of Earl Grey, giving up often seems like a good option.  When a manuscript you’ve poured your heart and soul into turns into a disaster that is only causing you frown lines and lost sleep it’s easy to say “I’m done with you!” slam the laptop shut, and storm off, with the feeling that you’ve won.

        An author always goes crawling back to their novel, including me.  It’s because of their characters, and their places.  I have spent months developing my protagonist Imogen, and the cursed town she lives in, Echo Cove.  A character quickly becomes more than that, they become a person with a multi-dimensional personality, complex interpersonal relationships, and thoughts and opinions of their own.  Imogen is no longer a seventeen-year-old girl who lives in Oregon.  She is me: albeit a smarter, prettier, wittier, skinnier, me, with boy problems.  Unlike me, I am sorely lacking in the boy department at all.  It’s unfortunate.  Imogen is no longer a character I think of as a “small-built girl, with short, dark hair, grey eyes, and stunning likeness to the portrait of Maeve hanging in the entryway of Worthington.”  She is a hero, with brains, and more fight in her than anyone else, and who is willing to sacrifice her own life to save the lives of the ones she loves.  And she is a creation of mine.  I shaped her simply from my own imagination, tweaking until Imogen was exactly what I had imagined in my head.  The rest of her character was molded by the plot of the manuscript, and her evolution has been incredible as her role has made drastic changes.

        Places receive this special treatment from their loving author as well.  When I began writing my novel the location seemed entirely unnecessary.  It says in my notes “birthplace: Deep South (not important,) current home: small town in Oregon.”  There have been some large additions to this section.  The history of Imogen’s hometown in rural Mississippi fills half a notebook, and the small town in Oregon is carefully mapped out in sticky notes on my wall that can be moved around when locations for certain important places do not work well.  Favorite locations of mine have sketches and earn special attention in their descriptions in my writing, as I want my writers to see them the coastline from Worthington exactly as I do.  I want them to see the gray, churning water swelling and cresting in whitecaps, before slamming into craggy boulders along the rocky shore.

        When I lay on my bed in the dark, eyes shut, music playing softly in my ears, just thinking, I know that this is what I'm meant to be doing.  With all the plot lines my mind is constantly inventing that quickly twist themselves together into a tale that is dying to be told, it seems that the only thing I can do is sit down and put pen to paper, leaving my thoughts in a more tangible form.  Creating people and places and their stories is what I love.  Through writing I have found my identity, I am a writer.