Where Do We Go From Here?

Where to go next is a loaded question. Creative writing started for me as something that I did during my high school classes after I was caught up on taking notes to keep me occupied. Then it grew into something I did when the classes were boring, and during my free periods. It took up nights, weekends, school breaks, it became my escape from the world. I became enthralled with telling tales and crafting worlds.

Some of my current projects are five years in the making. They were ambitious for a sophomore in high school, and unfortunately had the mistakes a sophomore in high school would tend to make in terms of dialogue, pacing, characterization, consistency. But I wouldn’t have spent the last five years working on them severely if they didn’t have something special already. In that time, I started other major projects that grew to seventy pages before being abandoned because they didn’t fit, abandoned only to be stripped for parts. The universe I’ve been crafting for the last five years, with most of the stories I have written, is crazy and chaotic but fun, and enjoyable, and there is a spark that an audience would love to see.

Unfortunately, none of my big works are polished enough, or even completed, to shop around. Line by line restoring a story that was seventy pages by a high schooler, to make it a more substantial length with more substantial development, more grounded in a sense of reality while maintaining its unique charm, is difficult. My current list of stories in their various states of completion looks like the workshop of a madman: abandoned projects strewn everywhere.

And the next challenge at looking to submit to and get published is myself. I am a believer in sacrificing commerce for the sake of art, which means I will never make it as a writer. But it’s still something I want to put out there, even if it means having to do it myself because I don’t want to sacrifice my vision. I’ve thought about going the unconventional route, reaching out to contacts in the movie industry, and presenting an adaptation of one of my stories as a screenplay, try and get myself in as a creative producer to ensure that the job is done right and is left open to making the studio more money. It’s a different philosophy I have looking at it.

So, I guess the biggest concern of mine is finding a place that will take my work as it is, without needing too many changes. Somewhere that my characters can call home as they are.