This is honestly just going to be a ramble of words. Hopefully, I can look back on this in a few years and have a laugh about where I started haha.
I love worldbuilding. I really like imagining new things–species, weapons, civilizations, magics, etc–and bringing them to life in a cohesive way. It’s why I love fantasy books so much. My favorite authors are able to take these super beautiful and intricately sculpted worlds and translate them into incredibly compelling stories that pick you up, set you on a journey, and never let you look back.
Some of my best memories involve binge-reading a book in the Stormlight Archive series and, immediately after finishing, going onto the series’ wikipedia to learn every possible thing I can about the characters, species, and plotlines I discovered in it. It’s a unique thrill that makes me feel like I’m floating around in some kinda quasi-stasis chamber where every new thing I look at is a new piece in a super intricate puzzle I know I’ll never finish. If that makes any sense, which I doubt it does.
Right now, I know I lack the ability to take the worlds I imagine and translate them into motivating stories that can have this same effect on others. I love writing, but sometimes I have a hard time taking the specific vision I have seared in my mind and grinding it into words on a page. So, my goal is to get better at doing that.
My current goal is to create several collections of short stories, each centered around their own unique worlds. The short stories in a collection might not interact, but they will all be set in the same world (I also hope to add random easter eggs in each one!). In making these collections, I think I’ll accomplish a couple things.
- I’ll learn how to take worlds that I create and craft unique, compelling stories aroud them.
- I’ll have a chronological list of sets of short stories that I can go back and look at in the future to see how I improved over time.
- I’ll just put in the reps. The ten-thousand hour rule exists for a reason.
So… yeah. Hopefully I can follow this guideline and write some pretty sick short stories in the coming years. The end goal is a book series! That would be awesome. Also, as a throw in, I’m probably going to write some technical blog posts/thoughts on random things every now and then. Yay!
~ Kiran @ 20.583 years old