First Challenge, First Win

I’ve been reading stories since I was young, probably early teenage years. It was just a coincidence that my father bought a Harry Potter collection for entertainment on a train when we visited Egypt for a holiday (vacation), but since then I was hooked in the immersive world these stories can create. I continued reading and even learned English while reading these books after coming to live in the UK.

Reading the Harry Potter books, and later Artemis Fowl, solidified the meaning of stories in my head about; stories are meant to suck you into their world and make you forget that they were made up for as long as you’re reading them. Of course, I understood that not all stories are fantasy or science fiction which makes immersion easier, but they are the stories I gravitated towards.

I can’t remember what the first thing I wrote was, but I do remember the story that I think set me on a certain path of writing stories that stuck with me until now.

Before I found Vocal, I used to publish my stories on Wattpad. I wanted to write stories similar to ones I loved; immersive worlds with deep and meaningful characters. When I first joined, I think I wrote a few short stories that I don’t particularly remember them. Shortly After I joined Wattpad, I came across a challenge set by a sci-fi centred group on Wattpad (I believe they were called Sci-kick). The challenge was to write a 1000-word story incorporating the number 1000. There were no further parameters.

I thought it was quite interesting, and I’ve never entered a writing competition before. I had just recently decided to start writing at that point, but I thought ‘what’s the worst that can happen’. There was no monetary prize for this competition; Sci-kick were creating an anthology of the winning stories and publishing them on Wattpad so it could raise the winners’ profiles.

The story that I wrote for this competition was called “Immortal’s Tale”. I believe my inspiration for the overall theme was a show called “Forever” which I was watching at the time. This show was sadly cancelled after 1 season, but it left quite an impression.

My story was about an immortal being living on earth. He was almost like a phoenix in that if he dies, he is reincarnated later. He also never grows beyond a certain age, so that presented its own problems when trying to integrate within society. He was apathetic towards humanity for most of his life and believed himself the only true earthling (based on humanity's behaviour. He gets sucked into their business every now and then but generally steers clear.

My story is an introduction to the motivation of this character. I had created a quick synopsis of a full-length novel for this story, and wanted the story I was writing to be a powerful introduction to that novel. I had no intention of writing further chapters in the beginning, but building the story in my head helped me understand what I needed from the first chapter: the story was going to be a dark superhero story where the main character is the misunderstood villain. There were many movies and tv shows that have brilliant villainous characters that had interesting backstories and I wanted to write something similar, and I wanted to build the world around the darkness of the main character.

The first thing I thought about is that most villains, except for psychopaths, usually have a reason for their hate and anger, so I wanted to create that for this character. What if during one of those times that he gets close to humanity, he had a wife that was killed? Stereotypical I guess, but I had an idea of how to incorporate the “1000” of the challenge and it worked well with this scenario.

I wanted the “1000” to be insignificant to the story, yet powerful at the same time. I didn’t want it to be an obvious addition which would take the reader out the story and into thinking “oh, that’s how he incorporated it”. I'm not sure if I had achieved that, but I think I did okay.

After his wife was killed, the main character was outraged and released all his anger on the city, burying everything within it. After describing that scene, the main character said the following:

Throughout my long life I have experienced a thousand deaths, and a thousand heart breaks. I still cannot decide which were more painful.

That was how I incorporated the 1000 theme. I have later mentioned a thousand again, but this was the main link to the prompt.

I wrote the story from the perspective of the main character because I wanted the voice of the story to be sombre, reflecting the apathy he had in general. Later in the story (as I had decided to write more chapters) the overall voice continues down the same path, but other characters are introduced that contrast it somewhat.

At the end of the story (what became the first chapter), the main character mentions how other superbeings came about, and how people started calling them heroes. However, these heroes were scrutinised and crucified over every little mistake they did, so the main character, with almost twisted logic, decided to become a villain to show humans that heroes were not infallible. Maybe after having a villain to unite against, humanity would appreciate heroes more. He did this to fulfil his lover’s dream where she saw people adoring and accepting her husband so that he wouldn’t have to hide his true self.

He wasn’t going to achieve that anymore, so he wanted the next generation to at least have a chance at realising that dream.

I ended up being selected as one of the winners, which was surprising and a delight at the same time. It was great seeing the positive feedback on the story I had created.

I had already decided to write more of this story, because I thought I had created something interesting, and the positive feedback only solidified that resolve. For me, the main aspect of the story is the voice of the narration. The apathy, ridicule and superiority the main character speaks in was what made writing the story enjoyable for me.

Through writing this story, I found it enjoyable writing in a darker tone. I felt it was easier to immerse myself into the story because of the character’s darkness. I don’t know what that says about me personally, but I genuinely thought the story would be more interesting if it had a darker undertone. That might have been the reason I liked the Harry Potter and Artemis Fowl books (probably my two favourite book series). If you look at the story in Harry Potter, while there are many heartfelt and jovial moments, the overall threat of the death eaters and Voldemort is the main plot of the series, and the tension keeps the story interesting. Artemis Fowl is a boy genius and criminal mastermind who tries to steal fairy gold. While he does become a better person later in the series, his criminal and cold mind is always present to grip the reader and pull them into the story.

Just a quick side note because I feel so strongly about this: I truly loathe Disney for ruining the Artemis Fowl movie. Now back to regularly scheduled programming.

I think darkness fascinates us because it is different than what we come across day-to-day. Most of us don’t see evil and darkness throughout our lives, so fantasising about it is intriguing.

At the time, after writing this story, I hadn’t really realised that I had a preferred way of writing a story. Years after writing this story, I realised that I liked darker stories that had rays of hope. This style seeped into my poems as well, and I wrote an introspective poem about this realisation.

Without realising it, writing Immortal’s Tale shaped my style of writing.