English Essay....yes I know I'm a nerd, why?
“It’s one in the morning, why are you still up?” Silence descends upon the room. There is no answer. “I’m writing, mom.” “Well, get off.” The door shuts again, a deep sigh, then a pregnant pause. “Are you off yet?” “No, mom.” “If you don’t get off in five minutes, you’re laptop will be taken.” “Yes, mom.” The door shuts again and this time you can hear feet shuffling back down the hall. You slump against your headboard and bang your head against it in aggravation. She just doesn’t understand, you’ve been in a rut for the past two months and just ten minutes ago inspiration smacked into you. You have to get it down before it escapes you entirely.
Most teenagers hate to write. Schools shove essays down our throats brutally, enforcing the five-paragraph rule and the importance of a thesis statement like it’s a command from God. If it were, most of us would be rotting in hell for being sinners. Not all writing, however, is evil incarnate. For a small group of us, there is a genre called fiction. In fiction anything you say goes. There are no rules of limits on what you’re allowed to write about. These words are fueled by your personal emotion and the emotion of people around you.
Like most students, up until my freshman year of high school, I abhorred writing, fiction, poetry, non-fiction, essays, everything. I had a reason to as well. My teachers tended towards the absurd. If the story wasn’t to their liking it was immediately going to get a lower grade. I happened to like weirder, more strange stories, whether it was in 6th grade with yellow snow or in 8th grade when my teacher made me rewrite an ending to a story because it wasn’t happy enough, but obviously the teachers weren’t fond of this. I lost confidence in my ability to string a sentence together for anything other than an essay.
The turning point showed up in the least likely of places. I can’t say how many others are like me, but I know there are a fair few. My first reintroduction back into the world of fiction writing happened when a friend unwittingly gave me a link to a story on Schnoogle (a Harry Potter fanfiction community). If you love Harry Potter fanfiction, you know of Schnoogle and if you know your authors you know of one named Cassandra Claire. I worship the paper she writes on. She is really the main reason I have become a self-proclaimed Harry Potter addict. Her trilogy exceeds anything any fanfiction author needs to write, but it got me wanting to write again as well. And I did. I started off too big though and with high expectations that were quickly shot down. My writing was too immature, to dry and dull. The skills were there. They just needed the work.
Yes, fanfiction. It is my vice, my guilty pleasure, my venting board. In fanfiction, the characters are already there at my disposal as are settings and clichéd plot devices. But it is what I create with these that make a difference. Sure, I can pair those two characters together and make them have many babies or die in a very Romeo and Juliet-ish way, but who cares? The common reader wants something a little more with their cliché thank you very much. A certain something special that will draw in the bored reader and make them leave reviews for my stories. What if in the Romeo and Juliet plot, it turns out that the Juliet decides to live and not stab herself, jump off a castle turret, drown in a bath tub, hang herself in the rafters, shoot herself in the head, overdose on drugs, catch hypothermia by running into a snow storm that magically appeared to add dramatic flare, jump into the funeral pyre, to show her eternal love to her Romeo?
Everyone falls into the cliché trap in fan fiction, it takes a real writer to acknowledge them and either use them and flaunt it or try to come up with a new cliché. But for all writer’s, myself included, it is painfully clear. It is a release from the mundane. It’s a way to place my favorite characters in situations that they would never be in the original author’s universe. Most wouldn’t expect writing to be considered an escape, but, for those who write fan fiction and dedicate a large portion of a year to a story, it is. Certainly there will be some people harassing you for wasting your free time doing something so completely fruitless, but you know in the deepest parts of your mind that this isn’t true. It is an exercise in writing, a way to improve my writing with helpful criticism of people my age interested in the exact same thing you are. Even best selling artists aren’t immune to the draw of fan fiction. Meg Cabot, the author of The Princess Diaries has boldly stated she wrote fan fiction as a teenager before becoming a published author.
This is one of those things that parents will never understand. They will never get the thrill of opening your email and seeing a new review alert that tells you what a spectacular wordsmith you are. They don’t understand how you can gain such camaraderie through fan sites and what a beta reader is. They will never understand how a story written by a 30-year-old mother, sitting in front of her laptop typing out a story, can make you go from happy to sad in the span of 20 pages online. Fan fiction is a huge community that I am happy to be a part of, for it gave me the confidence I needed to pursue writing all over again.
This is only my rough draft, and hopefully it'll be better later, maybe...I hope...
Most teenagers hate to write. Schools shove essays down our throats brutally, enforcing the five-paragraph rule and the importance of a thesis statement like it’s a command from God. If it were, most of us would be rotting in hell for being sinners. Not all writing, however, is evil incarnate. For a small group of us, there is a genre called fiction. In fiction anything you say goes. There are no rules of limits on what you’re allowed to write about. These words are fueled by your personal emotion and the emotion of people around you.
Like most students, up until my freshman year of high school, I abhorred writing, fiction, poetry, non-fiction, essays, everything. I had a reason to as well. My teachers tended towards the absurd. If the story wasn’t to their liking it was immediately going to get a lower grade. I happened to like weirder, more strange stories, whether it was in 6th grade with yellow snow or in 8th grade when my teacher made me rewrite an ending to a story because it wasn’t happy enough, but obviously the teachers weren’t fond of this. I lost confidence in my ability to string a sentence together for anything other than an essay.
The turning point showed up in the least likely of places. I can’t say how many others are like me, but I know there are a fair few. My first reintroduction back into the world of fiction writing happened when a friend unwittingly gave me a link to a story on Schnoogle (a Harry Potter fanfiction community). If you love Harry Potter fanfiction, you know of Schnoogle and if you know your authors you know of one named Cassandra Claire. I worship the paper she writes on. She is really the main reason I have become a self-proclaimed Harry Potter addict. Her trilogy exceeds anything any fanfiction author needs to write, but it got me wanting to write again as well. And I did. I started off too big though and with high expectations that were quickly shot down. My writing was too immature, to dry and dull. The skills were there. They just needed the work.
Yes, fanfiction. It is my vice, my guilty pleasure, my venting board. In fanfiction, the characters are already there at my disposal as are settings and clichéd plot devices. But it is what I create with these that make a difference. Sure, I can pair those two characters together and make them have many babies or die in a very Romeo and Juliet-ish way, but who cares? The common reader wants something a little more with their cliché thank you very much. A certain something special that will draw in the bored reader and make them leave reviews for my stories. What if in the Romeo and Juliet plot, it turns out that the Juliet decides to live and not stab herself, jump off a castle turret, drown in a bath tub, hang herself in the rafters, shoot herself in the head, overdose on drugs, catch hypothermia by running into a snow storm that magically appeared to add dramatic flare, jump into the funeral pyre, to show her eternal love to her Romeo?
Everyone falls into the cliché trap in fan fiction, it takes a real writer to acknowledge them and either use them and flaunt it or try to come up with a new cliché. But for all writer’s, myself included, it is painfully clear. It is a release from the mundane. It’s a way to place my favorite characters in situations that they would never be in the original author’s universe. Most wouldn’t expect writing to be considered an escape, but, for those who write fan fiction and dedicate a large portion of a year to a story, it is. Certainly there will be some people harassing you for wasting your free time doing something so completely fruitless, but you know in the deepest parts of your mind that this isn’t true. It is an exercise in writing, a way to improve my writing with helpful criticism of people my age interested in the exact same thing you are. Even best selling artists aren’t immune to the draw of fan fiction. Meg Cabot, the author of The Princess Diaries has boldly stated she wrote fan fiction as a teenager before becoming a published author.
This is one of those things that parents will never understand. They will never get the thrill of opening your email and seeing a new review alert that tells you what a spectacular wordsmith you are. They don’t understand how you can gain such camaraderie through fan sites and what a beta reader is. They will never understand how a story written by a 30-year-old mother, sitting in front of her laptop typing out a story, can make you go from happy to sad in the span of 20 pages online. Fan fiction is a huge community that I am happy to be a part of, for it gave me the confidence I needed to pursue writing all over again.
This is only my rough draft, and hopefully it'll be better later, maybe...I hope...