The Idea of an Essay, Volume 4

44 The Idea of an Essay: Volume 4 even better worlds than the ones in the stories. This desire ushered in a long stage of our childhood in which my older sisters and I drew maps and argued back and forth, inventing and counter-inventing the lore and culture of imaginary worlds on the spot. We competed childishly to see who could make the best and most complicated world, sometimes even acting out the parts of the peoples living in the worlds we made. As we grew older, though, just talking about these worlds became somehow boring and empty. I think each of us was subconsciously reaching out, searching for something more. I can’t point to the exact time we found that something; probably because it was there all along, and we simply needed a little insight to realize it. Whatever the case, my eldest sister was soon writing down stories and poems, giving her worlds a more tangible form. My second sister soon followed with stories of her own. I was a good deal slower, sitting back and watching my sisters write their stories while I still clung to the fabricated realities in my mind. One day, though, I got an idea stuck in my head that wouldn’t go away about a boy who receives a mysterious magical book as an anonymous gift. After several days of this idea nagging at the back of my mind, I relented and started writing; by the time I was finished, I had the first eight pages of a story. I continued to work on that story over time, and it grew into almost fifty pages of pure drivel before I finally discarded it as unsalvageable. That was my first failure, and looking back, I can see that the problem that killed it was a total lack of originality. At this point, I was basically just blindly imitating what I had seen. Even the original idea for the story was derived from another story I had read somewhere else. Though that story was a total failure, it still held value in that it helped me learn the basics of what not to do. To write a good story, I couldn’t take an idea and forcibly graft stock plotline segments together on it to make a whole. Stories are like fruit trees in a way; you plant the seed, and they grow, slowly, naturally, but steadily. Depending on the work you put into them, they may eventually bear fruit, and the more care provided, the better the fruit brought forth. Using this analogy, my first tree was a lifeless mockery of the term; instead of letting it grow, I pieced together a motley assortment of dead wood from other trees and cut it off at the roots to graft on the unsightly thing I had made. Needless to say, I got no fruit as a result,