Writing--What Did I Know?

I had never written anything that hadn't needed major revision. My teachers in school always told me that I was good at formulating interesting ideas, but not very good at expressing them. I needed help in both verbal and written arenas. But I had to give writing a shot anyway, since it was a major part of my grand vision. The ideas that floated around in my mind nagged at me to be released and often kept me awake at night. There had to be a reason I was heading down this path. All I could do was follow the inspiration. So I began writing the original tales.

I decided to resurrect some animated characters I had created as part of a remedial reading workbook I developed while I was raising my boys. At the time, I used the program to tutor remedial readers from my home. When I started writing the tales, however, I was no longer interested in the mechanics of the reading program. I wanted to give my quirky, otherworldly characters a new life within the realm of this new project.

With no more than a list of life-lesson concepts in hand, I wrote the first couple of tales. I purposely kept the language simple so that anyone, young or old alike, could read my work. There was no outline, and no plan as to how my ideas would all come together. I quickly realized there was much more to this than simply sitting down and writing fictional tales. I wasn't going to get very far in writing about my characters until I knew more about them. They needed distinctive personalities, looks, families, and reasons for behaving as they did.

Pause the process (Pause #1) and enter MS Access. I began building background character data: names, ages, heights, relations, attributes, jobs, generations and more. The database gave me a place to record all the little tidbits of character information I needed to remember as time progressed. My main character, for example, became a fourth-generation teenage male with a father, a grandfather and a great-grandfather, all of whom played parts in the developing stories. I built a form that gave me a handy page for each character as he or she entered the picture.

I also needed to know the backdrop for my tales. These characters were oddball beings that were certainly not human, although human-like, and so didn't fit into a typical earthly setting. It was great fun trying to solve this problem, because I let my imagination run free to see where it might take me. It became obvious that I needed to create another world somewhere out there for the creatures to inhabit. That was fine; I could do that. But then what? How would those of us on Earth know that this other world existed? Things were getting more complicated by the minute!

The answer came to me after some sentimental reflections.