First off... it is a really good thing none of you talked to me this morning. I was SO angry. I woke up to the sound of a vacuum cleaner at about 7:00am. I gave up by 7:30 and decided I might as well clean too if I'm not going to be able to sleep. If you could have been in my head this morning you'd feel pretty rotten. Everything was BLEEP this and BLEEP that. Good thing I don't actually speak that way.
Okay- now, after that side note, I'll get to the part I actually wanted to write about. So in my angry state, I began to come up with a character sketch for a story. This boy is in his mid to late teens, and like most teenagers, he's a pretty angry kid. He's had it really rough growing up though. Dad in jail, mom-so concerned with saving the world and the people in it, overlooked her own son and ended up "helping" someone who didn't want to be helped. Now, I already have a beginning to the story, and this isn't part of it, but the kid is waking up and dressing for something that turns out to be his mom's funeral (which we actually don't find out until much later).
Basically this kid has never had anyone to count on and no one to count on him. So now I need to develop the story more. I only have a rough outline. Throughout the present morning, we are taken back to earlier times in his life that help us sympathize with this otherwise bitter and unlovable kid. Sounds like kind of a sad tale... but it gets better. Later, in the present day, something happens that is really significant. I haven't figured out what that is yet. I want it to be something simple... something people would normally overlook as really ordinary... yet it has to be meaningful enough to this kid and his story that it SAVES him. He finds hope for the first time.
I really like coming-of-age stories and I also like realism. What is real isn't always the most pleasant thing to look at and consider. In fact, it almost never is. I mean, look at what we do to our world. Most the time, when we portray it, we make it much more remarkable and improve reality. We use things like photoshop to exaggerate the world around us. We use computers to create ideal landscapes. We write blogs and post pictures on facebook that seem to portray a much more exciting life than we actually lead. Well, anyway- we tend to pull beautiful paintings over our eyes and want to believe in them so badly that many of us actually think it is true.
Now I am not saying there is nothing of beauty in the world. There is. We just tend to want to make them more than what they really are. But I am also a fan of this alternate reality. I love the idea of improving reality a bit. I think it is really cool.
Anyway, this story will begin very real. To the point that it might seem extreme to people who've lived sheltered lives such as myself. But it will be uplifting at the end. I might even allow it to turn very stylistic in it's portrayal something that is better than reality. I don't know yet. So yeah- there is my story.
