Dear Reader,
Here is the story of this story as chronologically factual as I can remember.
The Beginning—So almost three years ago I was sitting in a classroom with a bunch of my fellow seniors. The class was Experimental Writing and with the exception of one or two other people, I was really the only one who enjoyed writing. I had been writing poetry for five years and even used a few of those poems for the class. But I'd never really written fiction until this class. As soon as I started working on flash fiction pieces I fell in love with the written word all over again. So when the teacher gave us the freedom to create our own project I thought, that sounds like fun. I mean, I liked to write and seemed to be somewhat good at it so I thought it would be easy to come up with an idea.
The amazing thing was that I didn’t have to come up with an idea. My best friend leaned across his desk and mentioned something about a story about fairytales, about fairytale characters perhaps. I immediately started getting ideas about all the stories I'd loved as a child. I knew I wanted the final project to be an actual storybook, pictures and all so I waited until the last minute to write the story. Generally being myself, an extreme case of human procrastination, I had a slight notion as to how I was actually going to conquer this idea but it transformed into something I hadn't expected, something I actually liked.
I handed the project in, all fourteen single-spaced pages of my short story, and received a 100%. Fast forward to the end of the year, to graduation, to pictures with aforementioned best friend, to a really long plane ride across the ocean to England with said best friend, and an incredible trip abroad. Here I wrote one poem and some essays but this story, the one you might someday hold in your hand, it was buried deep in my brain and I had no intentions of ever digging it back up.
Interior design was something I had planned for from middle school onward but writing…writing was a passion that just came naturally, something that I had always done. It helped me get through a lot of difficult things. (Well writing, mixed with Time, and a best friend, the same best friend previously mentioned.) So I felt that I owed quite a bit to writing, to the art and craft of writing, to my own writing. Imagine my surprise when the thing I thought I feared, the decision I never thought I could make, came surprisingly easy. You see after about two weeks at college, I loaded a fresh document in Microsoft Word and re-started a story, the one I hope you will see on a bookshelf someday. I finished the first three chapters and then stopped to pick up another project. The funny thing, is that I never gave up hope for this story. It sat in a binder labeled book as it didn’t have a title at the time and just stayed dormant until October 2011.
The Middle—October 2011 was a rather boring month of the fall semester as I still hadn’t been admitted into the Writing major just yet and I wasn’t taking any writing classes. So I was thinking what is the point? I was taking a Literary Analysis class, Sociology, British Literature part deux, and Intro. to Math. The closest thing to my kind of writing was an essay about The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston. So imagine my surprise when one day as I was being bored to death in my Brit. Lit. class and all of a sudden it was there, a seedling of an idea. And from there, for the next three weeks, I took pages and pages of notes, researched Grimm’s Fairytales, translations of Ring Around the Rosie, fleshed out characters, documented what will be five books worth of information, and created a name.
Around the third week of note taking I decided it was time to get those notes organized as that is how I am. Looking back now, I think I needed an excuse not to start writing. It seemed scary because for the first time I didn’t feel like I was telling the story but rather the characters were. I always thought it was crazy when people would talk about howtheir characters, how make-believe people would talk to them. But somehow, with this story, I heard voices in my head. Insane, right? It is something that you can’t really understand until it actually happens. But I digress… so out of fear or paranoia or whatever, it took me until the end of October to actually start writing.
The first four chapters were fairly easy because a lot of it came from my rough draft from the fall of 2010. After that it was completely new, especially because my fifth character was a brand new addition. Nine months later I finished a book, my book, my novel! I guess it is right in saying it feels like my child (nine months…get it?). So I will beg you to someday handle this story with care.
The End—This is still unknown. The book is finished and with several rounds of revisions under my belt it is definitely a lot prettier and grammatically correct. For the next few months I will be polishing it and when aforementioned friend returns from Australia we will sit and fix what is broken so that I can start sending this out to agents and from there...well from there I guess I leave this to the hands of the literary gods and hope that someday I will see this next to my Harry Potter books and my bright pink copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
I hope one day you enjoy reading this book as much as I enjoyed writing it. But I guess that is half the battle as a writer, truly enjoying reading your own book despite all the late nights, despite all the revisions, the paper cuts, the timelines, genealogical charts, character sketches, maps, and the loads of information that is only pertinent in your own head. This is the story I always wanted to write and I guess that deep down this story always wanted to be written. It persevered through senior year, a change of school and major, a change of title, and almost two years later it is the story my best friend inspired me to write...a story about fairytales.
I am leaving this story here so that one day when the story becomes somewhat blurry, when the details are too fuzzy to remember, I can look back and say yes, that is how it happened. Until then, I can’t wait to fall through! xoxo K.K.