Like my dad, I have loved stories for nearly my entire life. I've liked reading them and telling them. I've had some pretty interesting life experiences (at least to me) that I love to relate. Here are a few examples of stories I like to tell. I fell out of a second story window when I was a little kid, a few years later a car door flew open while my dad was driving and I slid out of the car and the only thing saving me from being run over was that my foot got caught in a seat belt. As a young adult, I hiked in knee deep snow in the mountains with shoes that were missing the toes and wearing shorts. I was almost in a plane crash as an adult (plane came within a foot or two of the ground before reascending).
In particular, I love stories that are character driven. TV shows, movies, and books need to have compelling characters or I get bored. I have given up on so many movies and TV shows that had great action, but the characters felt lifeless. I've absolutely loved movies that just feature character arcs with very little else going on. My favorite movie is Gattaca. It has a little bit of action going on (oooh, it's a murder mystery!), but that only serves to show some tension in the emotional progression of the protagonists. Field of Dreams is another. It has some fun stuff going on (the whole building a baseball field and taking road trips), but that is all secondary to the emotional journey of Kevin Costner's character. For a while Lost was my favorite TV show (before it went off the rails in the final season). It is a huge ensemble cast and a lot of crazy stuff happens, but for the most part it is all about how each of the characters grow (or regress) across the series. For books, I love the work of David Eddings. His two major series also have an ensemble cast and they go from one adventure to another, but for the most part the story is really about the growth and maturation of the boy, Garion, and the other characters and events all serve to teach him new lessons about himself. The Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan is the same way. It shows how all of the characters change due to the circumstances of life they are placed in.
I have had trouble sleeping for much of my life (more on that in another post as that plays a major role in the development of my book). One of the ways I have helped myself fall asleep from my earliest memories is to lie there in bed and tell myself a story, almost always with myself as the main character. Because it is my own story, I can really do whatever I want and I have always borrowed heavily from media, bringing in characters that I like. I will admit, most of those stories are absolute trash plot lines, but if I make them too complex then my mind gets going and I can't fall asleep, so in the end, dull stories help me fall asleep better.
That being the case, there is one story I have been telling myself for years that is much more complex. For who knows what reason, a good chunk of my self-told stories involve boats out on the sea, usually large galleon-type ships from the 16-1700s. Maybe imagining a wooden boat, with a gentle creaking of wood and rocking in the waves is soothing? But slowly a new story began to emerge from these large ship stories. I would imagine a crew of sailors setting off from a larger ship towards some mysterious island where adventure awaited. There was nervous tension in the boat as they did not know what to expect. Then I would imagine a woman, glowing so brightly you could barely see who she was) walking on the water toward the boat and scaring these sailors to death. I would often fall asleep before I figured out what to do about their next interaction. But bit by bit, when I really had trouble sleeping, I would get to the part where she would reach the boat, and she would be angry with them. She was some sort of guardian of the island and did not want them there and she would absolutely obliterate the boat; except she would save one person for reasons unknown and that man would be the protagonist of the story going forward. I never really made it past that part before I fell asleep.
Over time, I started to realize that this was a reoccurring story I was telling myself, without really thinking about it. So, I soon started to think about it during the day, often during a quiet time of daydreaming. I would ask myself who the woman was and why she was so upset with these sailors? What was it about the man that she saved that he deserved to be rescued? Why would she do it? What would happen to him next?
Another reoccurring story I had told myself while falling asleep for ages (I cannot recall when I first had this story come up) was some variation of a couple of peasant-like village kids that had these really normal lives, but the girl was special in some way. She was confident and talented, everything the boy was not. They were thrust into some adventure together and she came to care about him. He would have all these trials and travails, and she would come and rescue him with some sort of magical powers. It was a cute story, and probably one that I used to think about some sort of crush I had on a girl when I was little. I always kept it PG though ;).
Anyway, at some pointed I started to wonder if I could connect these two stories. What if the village kids and the sailor and the shining woman were all part of the same world? The moment I had that thought, an adventure story started tumbling out of me, but only in my mind. But I struggled with what events would happen to them. I started to think about who these characters were and what motivated them. I thought about how I wanted them to grow as people. I struggle with anxiety, so I wanted the boy to do so too, but he pushes through that anxiety to do great things despite it all. I wanted the girl to be aloof and a little arrogant but slowly soften and begin to care about others. I wanted the sailor to be selfish and bitter but learns to care about others and put the needs of others above that of his own. I wanted them all to feel displaced in the wider world, lost and confused, but come to a sense of acceptance to their new lives.
So, like all those movies, TV shows, and books I read, I knew who my characters were and who I needed them to become. All that I needed next was what to do after the shipwreck (in the case of the sailor) and after leaving their village (for the kids). Bit by bit, in my mind I found experiences that would force them to grow. But I needed something to bring it all together. I needed an antagonist to these protagonists. I couldn’t really come up with a good one. And then something happened to me that revealed just who (or what) that antagonist would be. Stay tuned for my next post for what that experience was and how it led to the creation of this antagonist.
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