| >> |
No. 385744
(Time to spice up this thread with a patented dose of "Wall O' Text".)
I wasn't a child prodigy when it came to writing. I wasn't born writing stories like Mozart was born writing music. When I was a little kid, I never even liked writing! It was one of my least favorite things to do in school, because it was always so rigorously controlled and and never got to really express any ideas I had. I was content to keep any fantasies or stories I devised (and there were many) inside my own head. As late as the 7th grade, I had never written more than a page or two outside of school because I had no desire to. What changed this was something so small it was almost inconsequential at the time, but like a butterfly flapping its wings and starting a hurricane, it grew to define my entire life.
In my very early teens (like pretty much everyone in the USA in the late 90's, I suppose), I got heavily into anime, particularly Dragonball Z. I met many people online who were into the same, some of which wrote and read a lot of fanfiction... and a lot of slash fanfiction. Because they were girls and that is just what 13-year-old girls DO, I'm convinced. I read some, too, and this helped me more fully understand my own sexuality. I became very close to another friend I met in this fashion, and in one hours-long conversation in the small hours of the morning, when I was 15, I was finally able to admit to myself that I was gay and that it WASN'T going to change.
(And reading slash fanfiction resulted in my finding out how much I like Trunks/Goten and then shotacon. I don't care about bonus points!)
But I digress. More importantly, however, I discovered something else inside myself — a talent I never knew. One day when I was chatting on a very dysfunctional Dragonball Z forum, something happened. It had been a running-joke for a while for some of us to derail topics with meaningless short runs of role-playing characters, given mostly as dialogue without description, because it was funny and we were silly and immature. At one point, I did one that ended up being very long and actually had a bit of a plot. To my surprise, everyone really liked it and begged me to finish it. So I wrote a couple more parts that wrapped up the events. I found, as I was going on, the structure started to change — almost by its own volition — into something more resembling a story instead of just a string of dialogue. While I had never been any sort of a writer, I was an avid reader so I knew how to do these sorts of things, subconsciously. Almost without realizing it, I had written my first fanfiction. (And it was utterly, horribly, embarrassingly terrible, but that's not the point.)
However, at the urging of these friends, I continued the "plot" (mostly self-insert characters of all of us going on random misadventures with our favorite characters along for the ride) into several more stories, each one going increasingly "off the rails" from its Dragonball Z genesis. I started focusing more on the original characters and situations that were only loosely related, and it wasn't very long before the stories were more "me" than anything from the source material. I longed to create something that was wholly original, and I was surprised to find that it was not difficult.
In only about ten years since then, I've gone from having written one horrible fanfiction to having written one complete original novel and with several more in the works. On my "good days", I feel as if I am going to make a legitimate career out of writing. If nothing else, I feel as if I writing is my best talent and the most important part of my life. It's pretty dramatic considering it came from some silly little thing on an inconsequential Dragonball Z forum.
That forum has since been lost to the shifting sands of the internet; all those friends have gone by now; I watch many, many more animes that are more interesting and more mature than DBZ, now. But the writing... the writing still remains.
In late 2005, my life was at one of its lowest points. At least until this current year, I feel it was the closest I ever came to suicide. I had graduated high school, and unfortunately, my friends were all overachieving nerds who went on to distant colleges and universities. Worse yet, the relationship with my first real boyfriend, which had lasted almost a year, had come to a crushing halt over the summer when I found out he cheated on me (and, what hurt the most, he was nonchalant about doing so). My first semester of college was a disaster; none of the counselors were any help, so I took all the wrong classes. I took a refresher course of pre-calculus (which I loathed and was terrible at, and should have been taking statistics for my major), an introductory philosophy class (which was so soul-searingly boring that I stopped even attending after a couple weeks), and inorganic chemistry... (which, considering I was going into either nursing or microbiology, should have been ORGANIC chemistry). Needless to say, I was failing or nearly failing all of them.
I was despondent and broken. I felt as if the world had nothing more to provide me so I may as well leave it altogether. So one night, September the 10th of 2005 to be precise, I did something I basically never do. I prayed to God to, "Give me a reason to live. Anything at all. Just something interesting." I didn't expect anything, of course; I never believed in any deities.
So I went to the TV, bored, and started flipping through the channels. By total chance (or divine intervention...?) I caught a midnight re-airing of the first episode of the dub of Naruto. Uninterested, but with nothing better to do, I watched. Somehow, the story of a boy with no friends, misunderstood by the world and crying for love and attention, struck a chord within me. That first episode was all it took to make me obsessed and to break my fugue.
I wouldn't go so far as to say Naruto saved my life... but it did do something. If I'm still reading/watching it to this day, even though it's gotten rather terrible recently, it's partially to give my gratitude.
This single action almost seemed to open up a set of floodgates. It was as if I suddenly became aware that there might be OTHER animes that I might like besides Dragonball Z. I started watching the dubs of FullMetal Alchemist and Neon Genesis Evangelion, and a few others. Through these, those old online friends I'd met several years before had much more to talk about and obsess over and develop obscure, ridiculous (but fun) stories about. Everything got better.
A few months later, I started working on my first completely-original story. It's still waiting in the wings, sitting on a back-burner in my mind and with a full plot synopsis and character analysis on my computer; I'll be writing it into a complete novel in probably a few more years. That all-encompassing project I mentioned in the other thread crystallized almost completely off of the deep mythology I developed for this one story. The reason it exists and the reason I'm here to talk about it is likely because of those animes and those people. Since then, a few times when I've been feeling down and hurt, having a terrible few months, I have an odd tendency to suddenly discover wonderful new animes and new friends that help me get back on my feet.
I owe a great deal of who I am and what I plan to do for the rest of my life to that little Dragonball Z forum and the people I met there, and that tiny story that grew and grew and grew. I owe my life to Naruto, FullMetal Alchemist, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and many others since then, and to the fans with which I have discussed them. I would be a radically different person were it not for those, for better for or worse, and I might not even be alive.
Did fandoms change my life? No. In many ways, they are my life.
|