Idiot Mistakes Vol I: Yeah, I’ll Definitely Remember That

I don’t know when it happened, but at some point, I got a brilliant idea. 

Some characters started banging around in my head, and I loved it. I began writing. I drew up a character sheet, wrote two pages of a scenario, tossed about an eloquent, yet empty introduction, and decided that the girl would look a bit like Mila Kunis. I even did a bit of research on some mythology. 

Then, out of nowhere, I ditched it. It was probably school. I went off to write poems, short stories, and a script for some grades. I spent a lot of brain cells on a research paper, a couple handfuls of assignments that taught me little or taught me a lot, I’m not sure.

In the end, my story disappeared from memory. I can vaguely remember my girl running through the green jungles of South America. I remember a bear eating a man; then it all gets fuzzy. In the end, I had made a terrible mistake. I thought the story concept I created was so brilliant, I would be able to remember it throughout all time. Which, actually, is a fair deduction based on my past. 

Thousands of stories roam my head, characters left over from when I was a kid. A fairy tale comes to mind. I created it my freshman year of college.  The characters have evolved over the years, yet I can never forget their factory settings. In high school, I wrote a “short story” for an assignment that became more of a novel and was about a boy with inexplicable wings. I’ve been so enamored with the characters, I went ahead and used them in a feature film script I wrote recently, but the original characters still fly around my head. Heck, I have a character running around in Hogwarts. I created her in eighth grade, and I still remember the fiery stinker named Sam who Harry Potter fell in love with because Ginny just did NOT do. I remember entire passages I wrote of a ball I created because the Yule ball didn’t play with all the romantic possibilities that it could have. 

The difference between the characters and stories I remember and my recent discovery has everything to do with writing the information down. Back in the day, I would spend hours writing out story lines and character sheets, heedless that each one would one day crash and burn and be discarded. My imagination was enflamed and I couldn’t stop writing for a second. I stewed so hard on those characters, that I still stew on them, wondering how I can develop their stories even now.

Unfortunately, going to college changed me. Not only did I stop bringing my notebooks to class in order to write my stories whilst pretending to listen to the teacher, but I also began to think that outlining and planning was killing my stories. I stopped writing every detail, leaving it up to memory and implication. 

I mean, yes, as a kid, I sometimes went overboard with my attention to the details. I was harming myself in creating family histories for every single character. And sometimes, the recording of information felt mundane, like trekking through unimportant territory. Yet, I can testify that getting down outlines and character work-ups—no matter how brief—is important.

So learn from my misery. While I will work on this story and make it good, I can never have the original story line. So write it all down. Don’t just think of your story lines. Memory fades, but paper doesn’t. And if you take your time and record as much as you can, then your characters will last centuries. Or at least your life time.