I'm The Biggest Star You'll Ever See, So You Can Go, But Know You'll Miss Me, I'll Leave It Up To You, Either Way You Choose, Oh, Honey, I Can't Lose
--"Biggest Star", The Elected
Tomorrow I take my first step into what I hope to be a new adventure. At or around 9:30 a.m. I will walk onto the evil den of Westwood to take a introductory screenwriting class called "Drafting a Career: a One-Day Workshop" basically to see if I have the chops and the initiative to actually take my writing from an overblown hobby and into the career I always envisioned it to be. I've asked many of my friends and acquaintances, and they've all agreed that this definitely is a good endeavor for me to undertake. With that in mind, I have high expectations that this will turn out to be a milestone in my life, when I finally took a skill I've always thought I was good at into a skill I really became great at.
I don't get cocky with many aspects of myself. I know I'm intelligent, but I've also met individuals who are far superior to me in intellect (cough, Jina). I know I'm funny, but there are far too many people put off by dorky sense of humor than entertained by it. About the only characteristic that people seem to agree on is that I write well and that I have some modicum of talent in whipping up stories rather quickly. I don't try to oversell myself, but as long as I've been conscious of it I've never sweated writing anything--even going so far as to begin researching, writing, and handing a 24-page term paper all in the span of 11 hours. It's the only thing one can ever compliment me on without garnering suspicious looks because I happen to agree that there is some germ of ability in me to put thought to paper.
Especially fiction.
----
The first time that I ever thought I could make a living at writing was when I was in Fourth Grade. Up until that time I had only been thought of as the weird kid who was kind of a pervert (in my defense, every boy at that age attempts to look up girls' dresses, just not everybody makes it so mistakenly obvious...). I think that's the reason it took me a long time to discover that I could harness my really overactive imagination for something productive rather than for idle daydreaming.
We had been assigned to write a story in thirty minutes. Basically, we would divide a sheet of college-ruled paper into three sections. The top section would be the introduction to the story. The middle section would be a simple illustration. The bottom section would provide the ending to the story. Knowing that I was a klutz when it came to illustration, I decided to write out the story in full before indulging in my scribbling for artwork. I let the most inane idea come through me onto paper and just worked from there. I wrote a story about a boy who finds an alien by the river and decides to take it him. The meat of the story involved the alien getting into three major mishaps all involving the boy having to hide the alien's presence by blaming it on himself. It was basically Alf, escept in sketch form. For a one-page story, I think it came out rather cleanly and coherently because, by the end of writing it, I knew I had done an above-average job. Especially for a throwaway assignment to test our creativity, I had put a lot of effort into making it into a story I'd want to read.
Oh yeah, the creative touch I was most proud of involving the story was the fact I made the alien look like a yellow donut.
I spent the last two minutes drawing a crude depiction of the alien at the donut box that I knew would tie into my having to recite it later on. Then I turned it into the teacher. She spent five minutes reading it and told me that it was decent enough to read it in front of the class first.
When I hit the part where I had the alien guy look up into the donut box and say, "Cousins!", the whole class burst into laughter. That's when I knew that I had something resembling a gift for writing decent material quickly. It wasn't like I had the scene planned out in my head going into the assignment. I saw the scene in the kitchen one moment and the opportunity just popped into my head. Looking out onto my class and hearing them laugh with me instead of at me made me realize that I may have been onto something.
And maybe tomorrow I'll finally discover what that something is.
Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers
Tomorrow I take my first step into what I hope to be a new adventure. At or around 9:30 a.m. I will walk onto the evil den of Westwood to take a introductory screenwriting class called "Drafting a Career: a One-Day Workshop" basically to see if I have the chops and the initiative to actually take my writing from an overblown hobby and into the career I always envisioned it to be. I've asked many of my friends and acquaintances, and they've all agreed that this definitely is a good endeavor for me to undertake. With that in mind, I have high expectations that this will turn out to be a milestone in my life, when I finally took a skill I've always thought I was good at into a skill I really became great at.I don't get cocky with many aspects of myself. I know I'm intelligent, but I've also met individuals who are far superior to me in intellect (cough, Jina). I know I'm funny, but there are far too many people put off by dorky sense of humor than entertained by it. About the only characteristic that people seem to agree on is that I write well and that I have some modicum of talent in whipping up stories rather quickly. I don't try to oversell myself, but as long as I've been conscious of it I've never sweated writing anything--even going so far as to begin researching, writing, and handing a 24-page term paper all in the span of 11 hours. It's the only thing one can ever compliment me on without garnering suspicious looks because I happen to agree that there is some germ of ability in me to put thought to paper.
Especially fiction.
----
The first time that I ever thought I could make a living at writing was when I was in Fourth Grade. Up until that time I had only been thought of as the weird kid who was kind of a pervert (in my defense, every boy at that age attempts to look up girls' dresses, just not everybody makes it so mistakenly obvious...). I think that's the reason it took me a long time to discover that I could harness my really overactive imagination for something productive rather than for idle daydreaming.
We had been assigned to write a story in thirty minutes. Basically, we would divide a sheet of college-ruled paper into three sections. The top section would be the introduction to the story. The middle section would be a simple illustration. The bottom section would provide the ending to the story. Knowing that I was a klutz when it came to illustration, I decided to write out the story in full before indulging in my scribbling for artwork. I let the most inane idea come through me onto paper and just worked from there. I wrote a story about a boy who finds an alien by the river and decides to take it him. The meat of the story involved the alien getting into three major mishaps all involving the boy having to hide the alien's presence by blaming it on himself. It was basically Alf, escept in sketch form. For a one-page story, I think it came out rather cleanly and coherently because, by the end of writing it, I knew I had done an above-average job. Especially for a throwaway assignment to test our creativity, I had put a lot of effort into making it into a story I'd want to read.
Oh yeah, the creative touch I was most proud of involving the story was the fact I made the alien look like a yellow donut.
I spent the last two minutes drawing a crude depiction of the alien at the donut box that I knew would tie into my having to recite it later on. Then I turned it into the teacher. She spent five minutes reading it and told me that it was decent enough to read it in front of the class first.
When I hit the part where I had the alien guy look up into the donut box and say, "Cousins!", the whole class burst into laughter. That's when I knew that I had something resembling a gift for writing decent material quickly. It wasn't like I had the scene planned out in my head going into the assignment. I saw the scene in the kitchen one moment and the opportunity just popped into my head. Looking out onto my class and hearing them laugh with me instead of at me made me realize that I may have been onto something.
And maybe tomorrow I'll finally discover what that something is.
Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers
posted by mojo shivers @ 12:40 AM
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