The Story Teller

I often never finish or follow through on my creative plans.  Even the art projects, written projects, etc. I do complete seem to take inordinate amount of time. Nothing comes easy for me, but then again, I am a lazy man.  Hence, the whole title of this blog, I think I wrote this all before....this brings me to my latest endeavor, storytelling.

I’ve always been a story teller for my kids, stories in the car, stories when we're stuck in public somewhere boring, you get the picture.  But my specialty are bedtime stories.  Since we brought our son home in September, I've had nary a night off (if I did have the night off for the girls, the story was told before their Mom tucked them in). In fact, I am working on basically the same world and characters since September. We’ve had all sorts of adventures; being taken prisoner by trolls (who wanted the main character's toenails, of course), hiding from witches, being caught in a goblin's snot net and generally adventuring in a fantasy world - think of it as Lord of the Rings-lite for ages 5-9.

Soon after starting these stories, I found myself on a Sunday afternoon, drawing a map of the entire world we had explored including areas we had yet to "visit".  It struck me just how much fun I was having creating this little world, even without the kids.  After a few more weeks of storytelling, I ran out of room on the map. At Christmas, my oldest daughter bought me a poster board and map pencils so I could draw the whole map out.   

Cute story, eh?

I was happy to start but then I realized what I was up against.  It took me well over a month to complete,  including coloring the map in map pencils. I usually worked at least a 1-2 hours a day and at times closer to 4 hours in one day. It basically became my life outside of parental duties and work. Every morning the girls would ask to see what I had worked on the night before.  

The finished map

 

Now, the wonderful aspect about the map was that it helps write the stories themselves.  Once you have the geography and culture decided on, then it’s just letting your characters interact within the framework of your world.  I estimate it took me a tad over 48 hours to finish  the map. The night I finished I took it in to get laminated and hang it on the girl's wall. 

All this is to say, I have been harboring dark, conceited little thoughts about publishing these stories in some capacity.  If it took me over a month just to complete the map how long would it take me to finish one page, let alone one chapter of a book I would be actually happy with? I don't even read children's literature, at least not this type.... I can't even write a blog post without finding numerous grammatical errors or unclear wording. Do I want to devote all my free time to working on something that holds no promise of success?  If I do finish, I would have to search for a publisher and likely be rejected countless times, maybe even face rejection for years?  Do I want to risk the fact that the likely outcome is, well, nothing tangible....

I’m not looking to get rich. I don’t care about that stuff, but I’ve always harbored the fantasy of getting paid to come up with silly ideas. I suppose this whole idea is silly (but it’s not as cool because I didn’t get paid for it).  

Sometimes I feel like God has pulled me in five different directions. Each direction offers completely different risks, outcomes, advantages and disadvantages.  Eventually, I will have to pick a path and hope for the best.  For now, I’ll just keep being the story teller before bedtime.