MISSION▪X SUMMARY Mary Harris
The first week of Mission X was hardest for me. I couldn’t tell you why, but it was. I sat there bored for an hour, the first day of Camp. The next day I just doodled and let myself get carried away. I was tired of being bored, so I drew a dull and gray picture and named it “Boredom.” The third day, all my drawing abilities were pooped, so I started thinking, swimming around in my thick, gray sludge pool also known as, you guessed it, boredom. I looked at the empty page in front of me, waiting patiently for me to give it life.
White...square...not soft, so it has to be rough...White…square…rough…white…square, like a house...rough…hite and rough like concrete, no, stucco…stucco…house…stucco house. That’s all it took. I had imagined a square house made purely of white stucco. It might not have been realistic, but who cares? It was Mission X. It didn’t really matter. So this was the way I opened up my story. If you notice that when you read the first chapter, it begins with my main character describing the house I imagined.
You might be wondering why I didn’t draw it out. Well, that’s because: A) there are some things I just can’t draw, and a realistic house is one of those things; and B) I pictured the object in my mind, and the only way that I could get that picture on paper was to paint it with my words. Once I started writing, I couldn’t stop. I just knitted little ideas together until it started to work itself out. Tie this in here...cut this part out...weave that thought in but not that wording—it needs to flow—add a little sorrow here and a bit of drama there… and voila, it works.
After a while, I got bored with my story line, and in the end I killed a character (whoops!). It made my story lumpy and the story line tangled and twisted, overlapping in the wrong places (it’s called a story LINE for a reason). Anyway, I ended up pulling the death out of the beginning of the story and slowly, in bits and pieces, adding it back in towards the end. This also gave me the idea of having only a sample of the main character Masako’s “Before” life, just so the reader can feel her pain and understand her a little better. I took away her memory in the second chapter, her ”During” world, so I could add in bits of her life and eventually a character’s death (I know; I’m so evil) back in. I wanted the emotion to explode across the pages so the pain is obvious in a silent way.
After reading this, someone’s going to think I’m depressed, but I’m just telling you the ugly truth of it (we are our biggest critics). The actual story isn’t that bad. It’s just…intense.
So yeah, that’s my story. The end?
For now. : }
(*smiles mischievously*)
X▪T I P
If you have an idea, WRITE IT OUT! I can’t stress it enough. When you keep an idea cooped up in your head, you get “inspiration constipation.”
