Bus Rides + Shark Tank + Crippling Artistic Fear = Story

Conversations have a way of sticking with me.

I rode the bus a lot as a kid, because when you’re a twenty-minute car ride to town, there aren’t a lot of other options. At my school, the grade school, middle school and high school happened to be in the same location. When I was in middle school, two high school teens—a boy and a girl—conversed with a strange lexicon and rolled pale blue dice atop their textbooks. Why were they talking about regeneration rings and vampires on my bus? They fascinated me. I huddled in the bus’s corner, backpack stuffed to the gills with textbooks, and listened with rapt attention to the conversation stitched between the cacophony of bus life. Over the next few years, I exposed myself to a wider world of fantasy, reading Tolkien, watching the Saturday morning cartoons, and even cracking open my very own red box Basic Dungeons and Dragons Set. Like sunlight, the exposure was healthy and consistent well into adulthood.

In my late teens, my artistic talent was far enough along that I entertained being a comic book artist. Why not? I loved drawing and storytelling in equal measure. Sketchbooks of artwork, invented characters, and pages of false starts fill the bins in my closet today, but I knew neither the industry nor the basics of storytelling. I also never learned to let go of a creative work before, it’s perfect and thus I never actually completed something. Those sketchbook bins are littered with ideas, but rarely finished works. I thought ideas and concepts were stories.

Some years ago, I sat in an entrepreneurship lecture outlining a business venture challenge for students and alumni. They pitched a contest with its goal intending to form teams and a venture (the step before Shark Tank contestants seeking angel investing). Entrepreneurship shares a lot of similarities with creative endeavors, but what stuck in my mind was the Q&A session with a VC mentor. A swarthy, eager student got up and asked, ‘I have an idea and I want to join a team. How do I protect my idea and keep it from being stolen?’ The elder statesman sighed, adjusted his glasses, and leaned forward on the barstool. ‘The thing you have to understand is that ideas are worthless. It’s what value you bring to your idea and the work you put into developing your idea into a business.’ I never joined a team nor seriously considered any entrepreneurial endeavor, but that conversation stuck with me long after my studies were over. Why? In hindsight, I suppose it stuck because, though I finished a lot of things in my life and career, the completion of a creative endeavor was always something just out of reach.

One such creative endeavor in the 2000s was a graphic novel about a group of characters trapped in a fantasy world. It had an ensemble cast, an interesting premise, and it might’ve had a compelling visual style if I could pull it off. I’d written a few passable screenplays by that time, so I fired up Final Draft and tapped out two episodes of the story. I’d even had a logo created—I was that serious about the idea. But with all things creative up to that point, progress slammed to a halt. I couldn’t let go of creative perfectionism and the sense that my artistic ability had limits grew to insurmountable levels with my age. In love with the idea, I pitched it to a friend. Why not? She was a fantasy fan and a gamer—she could appreciate the best aspects of the story. As most friends do, she encouraged me to develop it further, but she wisely nudged me away from trying to take on aspects where my crippling insecurities held the story back. She pitched back to me a novel called Ready Player One, my first litrpg/gamelit read, and we talked and shaped my story. Those conversations developed far beyond what I’d originally envisioned. Yet I wasn’t ready to write it then. I hadn’t learned the craft of writing. Not long after, I put that story on the back burner and dusted off an ‘easier’ story I’d been working on around the same time. It took me years to finish.

Today, my crippling artistic doubt hasn’t left, but writing has grown into a passion. I’ve abandoned that fantasy story as a visual tale and pivoted it into a fantasy series. Strangely, too, that doubt doesn’t seep too deeply into my writing.

Conversations are little chain links that lead you to new revelations. This new fantasy tale results from many conversations throughout my life. I’m nearing the end of a large trilogy draft. The last six months of writing dwarf any single manuscript I’ve worked on, but this isn’t the concept that got me going decades ago. It’s better than that.