My Drive

The Things That Drive Me

By Stephen Donnelly

To put things simply, writing has been something that has always put a light in my life. It took me too long in my life to figure out something I did in my personal time like writing could be something I could actually do and people enjoy. It was always something that I have done for personal use and to create something that I could enjoy.

It wasn’t until too long ago that I actually started sharing my works with people I knew and soon after that strangers. After people started to give me compliments on some of the things that I shared them. This is when I thought to myself that I should really make something of this other than just to get thoughts out of my head. To come up with unique concepts that I would like to see in more popular media.

It started with me writing Batman comic/movie scripts to fix what I have been seeing in the “darker” Batmen that have been coming out. Most of the time they would just make him darker by allowing him to break his one rule of killing. When I would fix that and put The Batman in a darker world where he has to deal with death and not saving people in time or creating his own villains through tragedy. This would leave the Batman to fight through not only the physical brawls but emotional ones as well.

This rolled into me wanting to get published and so I started to work on a project that I currently dub RErevolution. It started as something I was just writing to throw into publication and get a name out there. Seven years later and I still haven’t gotten it published because it has turned more into a passion project than anything and I want it to look perfect. It is a statement against abusing the environment and the costs of revolutions. While also leaving a road map to create a utopia without it leading to the inevitable dystopia using science that is reachable in today’s world. Let alone when this project finally finishes and gets to hit the market.

So I moved on to trying to get with some artists on the internet to do a web-comic together. It would only go as far as asking to see someone of the work they enjoyed doing. Something that had more in them than commission. This way I can get a sense of their art style and write something that would more compliment what they like to draw so it wouldn’t feel so much like work for them. I would write up about ten or so pages of content and send it. Then months later not receive anything back other than “I am too busy” with maybe a “sorry”.

In the middle of working on that previous project I was going through many of my older projects to find something that I could finish and publish and venues of publication though I would still prefer to write movies and shows. I needed to do something that didn’t take a budget or needed a crew to complete. So I worked on a novel. I even went as far as to do the cover art myself and got my mother to edit it for me. The Jobs We Do was published and I received the one compliment I was actually fishing for. “When will the second one come out?”

I started writing for Newgrounds contests right before I published my first book trying to feel like what getting my work out in the public would actually be like. Judged by other writers and judges that want to read the random works of people on the internet as a way to really cut my teeth. The first contest I won more than just honorable mentions was one for a short script that was supposed to be animated by the website. Though the project could never find an animator so it is bits of concept art and voice lines floating around waiting to be finished. Discount Detectives is something I plan on finishing as well.

Those are the projects that have gotten the furthest into the public eye. As far as The Jobs We Do goes I am working on the third while the second is in editing and road-mapping the fourth and final in the series. I am also converting the first book into a movie script. While I am also working on another book where it personifies mental illnesses as characters and has them interact in familiar ways with the intent of making something unfamiliar to some more familiar and understandable. Or making something someone has easier to understand and explain to others while also hopefully giving them a tool to better control ones that usually need therapy over medication.

Beyond this I have so many other projects that I am working on that span all kinds of genres. They vary from just being fun action/fantasy. All the way to asking philosophical questions that I don’t see like “What if ‘God/Gods’ created us to be more perfect than they were.” Like us creating robots. All the way to asking about what the human condition could end up being. Trying to do what I can to push things forward and groundbreaking without being full of myself. This is ultimately why I write. And why answering the question of “What do you write?” is so difficult for me to answer.