I’ve been writing stories since I was a little kid.
It’s a popular myth in my family that at six-years-old, after seeing a behind-the-scenes special about James Cameron, I decided to make my own version of Titanic. I made storyboards, asked my dad to be the camera man, and shot a whole sequence that involved loading my stuffed animals into lifeboats made of Tupperware bins before my dad turned the camera sideways to sink the couch into the living room carpet.
We all start somewhere…
Movies were important to me, but I lacked the tools to make them the way I wanted to. I turned to novels instead, figuring I could easily conjure the imagined movie that accompanies reading a really good book. I wrote my first novel for fun in the seventh grade. At the time, I was obsessed with Nintendo’s Metroid Prime 2: Echoes and wanted nothing more than to write the follow-up. So that’s what I did.
For most of 2005, I spent all my free time writing my own version of Metroid Prime 3. I did research about the games and the worlds they contained and compiled everything I learned about Samus Aran into a story about a war between the Galactic Federation and space pirates on the fringes of the galaxy. It’s an embarrassing admission, to say my first real attempt at writing was Metroid fan fiction, but again, we all start somewhere.
And due respect to Metroid Prime 3: Corruption–a game that integrated all the best elements of the Prime series and expanded into new territory–but the story I wrote was better.
After a while, I set Metroid aside and decided to write something original, the definition of the word “original” being loosely applied here. I opted to write a horror sci-fi novel, stealing heavily from the remastered Resident Evil (and its novelization) and Ridley Scott’s Alien. The characters were named after my friends and the dialogue was a poor recreation of things I assumed adults talked about (including buying tickets to NCAA March Madness, based on listening to my dad and his friends.)
This project, titled The Parasite Conspiracy, was a step forward, but it was also clearly a rip-off of all the things that inspired me. The Miles Davis quote “Man, sometimes it takes you a long time to sound like yourself,” comes to mind. But I was a kid. I was learning.
Following the transition to high school and my first real heartbreak, I started another novel, this one detail the adventures of a teenager who commits suicide and winds up traversing the space between life and death. The fascinating thing about this project was that the majority of my influences were visual, rather than narrative. I wasn’t trying to tell a story so much as I trying to capture a feeling, an aesthetic.
I was big on punk and emo music at the time and spent most of my afternoons watching music videos and obsessing over that album artwork. The biggest influences on this project became concepts and visuals from music videos such as The Used’s “All That I’ve Got,” System of a Down’s “Question!,” Linkin’ Park’s “Breaking the Habit” Saosin’s “You’re Not Alone,” and of course, My Chemical Romance’s “Welcome to the Black Parade.” Throw in a religious upbringing and a pseudo-unhealthy fascination with death and you’ve got all the raw ingredients for something uniquely terrible.
Looking back, the biggest lesson from this project, titled In Love and Death after The Used album of the same name, was the tensions between input and output. I was trying to build a piece of narrative art using strictly visual input. Turns out, if you’re going to write a book, reading other books is more useful than Tivoing episodes of “Loaded” on Fuse and slamming to My Chemical Romance.
Again, it’s embarrassing to look back and remember these projects now. But at the same time, it’s important to remember where we came from. It’s important to let ourselves love the things we love, even if we don’t love them the same way we used to.
There’s also comfort in the knowledge I was doing then everything I’m doing now: looking to the things that inspire me and allowing them to propel my work. I’ve learned a few things in the time since, but at the end of the day, I’m still just doing what I’ve always done.
And now for something completely different: Speaking of “early stuff,” words cannot succinctly express how much I love the scene in Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There where Bob Dylan (Cate Blanchett) and Allen Ginsberg (David Cross) taunt a plastic Jesus, mounted on a crucifix. “Why don’t you do your early stuff?” Blanchett cries, a creak in her voice half irreverent, half tragic.
joshua chamberlain 