Atlantis Rises

I’ve been thinking a lot about why I write lately. The easy answer is it just seems like what I was meant to do. I have all these ideas just bursting from my imagination and I feel like I’ve simply got to put them on paper. The real question is why am I driven to be a writer? For years I looked to other creative endeavors first. To really explain things I think I should start at the beginning.

When I was young I hated reading and I had horrible penmanship. By the time I was 8 the school district had decided I had a learning problem and put me in a program called chapter one. Shortly there-after they discovered I wasn’t slow, just bored. What really sparked my interest in reading was a novel by Isaac Asimov and Janet Asimov called The Norby Chronicles. It was a novel targeted at kids and it was awesome, thus began my love of Sci-Fi. I followed The Norby Chronicles with the Foundation series, which was some very heavy reading for a 10 year old. While I didn’t understand everything in the Foundation series the things I learned from it gave me a desire to read everything I could. When I was 11 my dad gave me two series of books, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant and The Lord of the Rings (including The Hobbit). At the same time I found 2061 by Arthur C. Clarke. That novel inspired me so much I actually wrote Clarke and his response inspired my desire to write. The same year I started writing my first novel.

The books I had read to that point made me want to create my own worlds. Even as a child I always had ideas in my head and with writing I found a way to get them out. Over the next few years I would labor on and off on my fantasy epic, typing it all out on Commodore 64. Work only really stopped on it when I hit the 64k limit of that little computer (which came 1 letter and 1 period before the end of the first chapter). My freshman year of high school I took a drama class and our final project was to write a play. Well I knew immediately what my group would be doing for my play and I began adapting the first chapter of that novel into a script. Anyone who knows me knows I think big, so it should come as no surprise that I decided to do a film instead of a play. I borrowed a video camera from our band director and in one day shot a 10 minute movie. Now I had access to editing equipment at the school (we had a very cool Amiga setup) but I had no idea of that at the time. We ended up editing as we went, the only thing that stayed on film was the final version. With that film I moved on from novels.

Over the next decade I would get my creative urges out in many ways, first as a game designer. Somewhere I still have the source code for what was to be my multiplayer RPG/Action game, written in Pascal for (and I cringe to admit this) the Mac. Then I found release for several years being a game master for several roleplaying games (mostly the excellent Palladium game Rifts). Then in my mid twenties I went back to writing scripts and started playing around with ideas for novels again. I really wanted to do both. A few years later I met Jeff and we spent several months working on several comicbook ideas (I’d moved on from novels and writing in general for a couple years, during those years I suffered from some serious depression which all started when my dad died, but that’s another story). Once Jeff and I realized that we just couldn’t produce a comicbook on any kind of time table (and that there was no way we could pull off the level of art work we really wanted on any sort of regular basis) Jeff suggested moving back to prose. I had returned to writing prose again and I finally started to understand why. I want to inspire people the way Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Stephen R. Donaldson and J.R.R. Tolkien inspired me.

To put it simply I write for two reasons, first of all because I have this vast need to create something and second because I want to inspire people.

With all this in mind I’ll be starting NaNoWriMo on Wednesday, Jeff and I will be racing to our 50,000 words and I’m getting really excited. I’m doing a project I’ve been wanting to do for over a year now but I’ve been too scared to even start it. Wish me luck.