The month was November 2020, and I decided to participate in National Novel Writing Month, or Nanowrimo. It was the eighth month that the COVID-19 pandemic was continuing to sweep the nation, and I was still required to stay and home and quarantine. So, I thought it was a good opportunity to use the extra time I had sitting around at home to finally write the novel I had been cooking in my brain since I was a kid, for almost a decade, The Star Spirits. I had never written something so long before, but since I had so much experience writing and I was already in college, what would stop me from finally finishing it?
But wait, how did we get here? It’s so hard to believe that I’m finally pursuing full versions of the stories that I said I would finish “when I was grown up”. But I can’t acknowledge my current passion for writing fiction, and starting ambitious projects, without giving credit to all the things throughout my childhood that helped to change me and sharpen my skills. This is my story of being a writer.
Starting from my earliest memories in childhood, I was always told by the adults around me that I was smart and creative. From Kindergarten, I was placed in the “gifted” class section after taking a placement test. Now, it’s definitely a silly concept to me that you would be able to tell if an actual kindergartener was more “gifted” than another kid, and that you should bring in the idea of academic competition to their lives that early; I disagree with the kind of program I was put into. But I have to admit that having that sense of competition drove me to continue to strive higher in my academic life. I excelled in all subjects, including reading, math, and science, because I wanted to keep my status as “gifted”. Even though I was good at a lot of things, one academic activity spoke to me much more than everything else we did in school, and that was writing.
My first memory of writing my own story was in first grade. My elementary school had a tradition called the “Young Author’s Project” where, every year, we were given a blank white hardcover book in which we were free to write whatever story we wanted. My first story that I wrote was inspired by the white book itself and its magical possibilities; it was titled The Blank Book. The story was about a girl who discovered a blank book, and then got thrown into a magical world inside of it where she meets a fairy. My favorite genre was fantasy, especially cartoons and anime that included fairies, like Tinker Bell and Winx Club, so everything I wrote was fantastical.
The Blank Book was a simple start, but I realize that it was a starting point for the same characteristics I would put in my other stories for years to come. The genre was magical realism, I created my own lore about magical creatures and the world they lived in, and I created characters based on classic literary tropes. The next two years for my Young Author’s Project, I wrote two sequels to The Blank Book.
At the beach, there was once a fairy named Atta. She had Bright Blue curly hair which shimmered as bright as a pearl. She was half mermaid, actually. She was mostly a fairy with gills. Then one day she decided to go for a walk. And then a bat with silver wings went past her and snatched her wand! … Moonglow cave was one of the darkest caves in the land! Atta lost the bat half way through the cave.
In these sequels, I introduced new characters, such as Atta (pictured above), and went into more detail about what the fairy world looked like. I revealed that the blank book from the first story was secretly a time machine, and the fairy world was Earth millions of years ago. I remember that the second story, Sarah and Atta, was so long that I needed my mom’s help to cut down the story. I now realize that this was the start of my tendency to craft long and complex plots with significant arcs.
Throughout elementary school, my parents bought me endless amounts of notebooks. Every Christmas, I would open my presents, and there would be at least five fresh new blank notebooks for Lyla to write in, and it made me genuinely happy. I eventually had entire bins full of notebooks. But what did I write in them? I came up with dozens of story ideas and made lots of drawings and doodles of the characters and objects in those stories. Around this time, I also became interested in posting on Internet forums, and sometimes shared my stories with other people. As I re-read those old stories, however, I notice that I rarely ever finished any of them. The concepts were just too large to finish before I got distracted by the next idea clogging my mind, and I started writing in a new notebook or new document.
Eventually, my mom started sending me to writing workshops at a local program called 826CHI. Each workshop was centered around a different theme, and they were always quite specific and quirky. In third grade, when I went to a workshop about zombies, I wrote a short funny story inspired by Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” music video called “The King of Zombie Pop”, in which a zombie visits Michael Jackson’s grave and gets an autograph from the now-zombified Jackson.
The staff at 826CHI would regularly go through their archives of student-written content and publish their favorite works in a book series called The Compendium. To my surprise, they decided to publish “The King of Zombie Pop” in The Compendium. I went to a showcase at the Printers Row Lit Fest, stood on stage, and read my story to the audience. It went surprisingly well; it felt very natural for me to read the words I wrote, and the audience would laugh at the funny parts in the story. After that moment, I realized a couple things: one, I was really proud of my unique writing style and others were starting to appreciate it too, and two, I also liked to write short silly stories and not just epic fantasies.
In middle school, I started to get a better grasp of my epic ideas, and didn’t always leave my stories unfinished. I cherished each fiction writing assignment in school, which were rare among all the analytical essays and math problems. I wrote enthusiastically for every assignment. I had a very strong passion for a particular story I wrote in 6th grade called Lorna’s Kingdom, another fantasy tale. It was both the longest story anyone in the class had written, and my teacher’s favorite story from the class.
Then there she was- Rebecca herself. A ruined black dress, scary yellow glowing eyes, full of vengefulness. She reminded them of the evil queens from fairy tales, but she looked younger than they usually were. Her skin was as pale as a sheet. She floated over to the throne, staring at the messed pile of dirt. She turned around, and everything froze. She stared right into each and every girl’s eyes. She lowered her face and spoke. Everyone was absolutely terrified. “Give me the seed.”
I can’t forget that when I graduated from middle school, a girl that I barely knew wrote “You have such a talent for writing and I hope it will take you far” in my yearbook. It struck me that someone had noticed my passion, even though I did not have many opportunities to show it publicly.
Around that time of my transition between schools, I wrote what was probably the longest piece I had written and finished so far, The Ultimate Scary Story. It was based on all the scary “folk tales” we had spread around at my summer theater camp year after year. I found a way to fit all the different tales into one timeline. I changed the characters’ names to the names of my campmates. Every week, I would finish a chapter, print it out, and read it to my friends at camp. They got so involved in the plot that I wrote a sequel for them. I was too old to come back to camp, but I hung out with my former campmates at the nearby Dairy Queen the next summer, and had my friends read the chapters. The genuine bonds that I held with those campmates over The Ultimate Scary Story is one of the fondest memories of my entire life, and something I have not yet recreated while sharing any of my other stories.
CHICAGO, IL—An 8-year-old girl in the Belmont Central neighborhood has been murdered by a man disguised as a clown statue within her home while she was being babysat. The parents of the victim as well as the victim’s babysitter were interviewed by news anchor Robin Wren. “He looked just like a statue to decorate a child’s room. He was smaller than an average man, and he looked shiny like plastic. It was the craziest disguise. I had absolutely no idea he was a real person! I was so surprised when I found out he was a real person, because her parents told me they didn’t have a clown statue,” said Kat A., the victim’s babysitter during the time of the murder.
(Pictured: An art project I did during my sophomore year of high school where I drew scenes from what I considered the most important stories I had written or planned to write (counter-clockwise from bottom-left, in chronological order from my life): The Blank Book, Monica’s Hall, Bella Gratch, The Star Spirits, The Elementals, The Witch Princess, Lorna’s Kingdom/Colorix Club, Autumn Spies, Hyperstation Eliminate, and The Ultimate Scary Story.)
In high school, I was exploring lots of different activities like debate and theatre, but writing was still my dream career. However, lots of things changed about me as a writer. There were different outlets where I shared my writing: a playwriting/play-production club called Copala, a drama class with a playwriting unit (which led to me going to an associated playwriting camp), and finally, a creative writing class (senior year). I noticed that the various stories I was writing for these activities were very different from the fantasies I churned out during my childhood. In fact, some of my new stories involved no fantasy elements at all. They primarily had simpler concepts that focused on conveying a certain profound message, or tone, rather than just trying to make a complex fantasy plot with numerous characters and worlds.
For example, perhaps the work I’m most proud of during high school was titled White Lines on the Freeway. The concept wasn’t entirely original. Around this time, music was becoming a huge part of my life and was inspiring me. The folk singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell was one of my favorites. I decided to write a play for Copala that was inspired by the lyrics of Mitchell’s album Hejira, a minimalistic folk album about a woman travelling all over the country, looking for love. My play follows a similar concept, and doesn’t necessarily follow a traditional plot structure, particularly because the album itself is so abstract in narrative. The main thing I tried to convey was the complexity of Joni’s character, and her emotional distance from others. This makes it difficult for her to connect with others’ feelings.
JONI: Phyllis, I see something of myself in everyone. In my possessive relationship with John, so many of my feelings couldn’t be expressed. So now I’m returning to myself, these things I had to suppress. I knew no one was gonna give me everything, but either way, we all come and go unknown, each so deep and superficial, between birth and death. I wish you could have discovered that, at least for a while. But it wouldn’t have mattered, anyway. You know, love always sucks us back to the same old way and makes us forget. We’re only particles of change, orbiting around the sun, but how can I have that point of view when I’m always bound and tied to somebody?
As I reread this passage, I see that there is a lot I would do differently. I copied large sections of lines almost entirely from Joni Mitchell’s lyrics, which made some parts of it almost nonsensical because of the idiosyncracy of her poetry; now, I certainly would have written these lines more naturally. However, this is still an obvious difference from writing about fairies and the lore of magical lands. Because I look back at this and still feel embarrassed, I guess the quality of the play itself isn’t the main reason why I’m proud of it; that would be the fact that the Copala club directors chose to cast and produce my play. The production was humble, but it certainly honored my vision for the play, and I was satisfied with it. Years later, while texting my friend Josh, I reflected on the play. He asked me how it felt, and I said, “A little embarrassing, but it also made me feel like a legitimate artist”. I found his response profoundly touching: “You are definitely a legitimate artist. The difference between fake artists and real genuine, bonafide artists is that embarrassment, that sense of self-doubt. So when you feel those feelings, remember they are signs of your genuine soul connection with art. Even the cringe; especially the cringe.”
I definitely doubted myself as an artist a lot throughout high school. My close friends didn’t seem to particularly care much about my writing, at least not for a while (I’m thankful that it’s been getting better lately). I was also getting rejected from a lot of creative programs at school; I wrote a long and ambitious play for Copala that didn’t get produced, I was in the bottom three auditions for Poetry Slam and didn’t make the team, and I never got any lines in the school musical.
I didn’t come to terms with this self doubt until I wrote a very important essay in my first college writing class that inspired me to think critically about my inner self. I wrote about how upset all those rejections made me feel. I wanted to believe I was talented and gifted like I’d been told since I was five years old, but it didn’t seem to show itself when it was time for me to be seriously evaluated as an artist. But I had to realize that the purpose of making art isn’t to get awards and have big audiences. It’s about expressing yourself and having a greater, more beautiful connection with the world by exploring how it works and putting yourself out there in unique ways.
So in college, my next shift was to start big projects that revisited the fantasy stories of my childhood, and I finally fulfilled those dreams after all that I had been through. I had to keep in mind that the ultimate goal was to finish the stories and be personally happy with them, rather than seek attention with them. My two most recent projects have been a Winx Club inspired webcomic, and my Nanowrimo novel, The Star Spirits. Both of these projects have been in my mind since I was about 11 years old. It’s not just about expressing myself creatively, but making my old self proud. I may not spend as much time watching fantasy shows now as I did back then, but I know that the old Lyla would have wanted college-age Lyla to use her sharpened skills to finally write these books in the form that I dreamed about.
A page from my current webcomic, Colorix Club.
If I was a pencil, and my various writing projects throughout adolescence helped to sharpen me, then I guess writing my novel transformed me into a paintbrush and an entire set of paints. Now that I have finally written a 52,000 word book inspired by the ideas I had accumulated since I had the first inkling of an thought about The Star Spirits while watching anime as a kid, I feel like I can conquer any writing challenge.
“Wow, you’re right,” Filip remarked. He didn’t know why he had never tried to sleep after he died, even if he didn’t need it, just to feel what it was once like again. “Um, especially because we have each other now.” He laid down next to Nell and they slept together as the sun went down and the wind rustled the leaves of the trees outside. It really was the most beautiful thing to not just focus on one’s needs and missions all the time, but to take time to relive the sweetest moments in life, and feel the fullness of your heart.
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