During the seventh grade, I wrote a script for a science fiction movie that I wanted my friends and I to act out on piece of property that my parents owned on Henry road. My plan was to convince parents to build a fort on one part of the property and a small town on another piece. Boy's Life had advertisements for plans that showed how to make a hovercraft using light wooden frame and a vacuum cleaner. It was said to hold up to 200 pounds. By my middle school reasoning, I could make a much larger, ship-like hovercraft with ten vacuum cleaners (as long as the ship itself weighed less than a ton). With these working props, I would be able to convince the kids at my school to join me in making a fantastic movie. Thus I wrote a story which had characters that I hoped my fellow students would want to play. Even the "bad guy" parts were written for people I knew who wanted (some even agreed to) playing the roles of the villains.
As I wrote my script, I came to realize that the props and sets I had planned would not work. For example, the fort I wanted to build would need multiple floors and corridors that would take up a much larger area than what the clearing I had planned to put it in would allow. Still, I finished the story anyway, and showed it to the other students at lunch as well as my English teacher. I was quite a hit. Even my friends liked it. Granted, I gave them all heroic roles and, in the end, they all had super powers. My teacher was also impressed and spoke with my mother about my potential.
I don't know what happened to that script. However, elements of the story have still rattled around in my thoughts and day dreams. When I read portions of the Iliad in the tenth grade, I was struck by some of the similarities between my hero (which was my role, of course) and Achilles's situation. Both were reluctant to fight because of a girl until a friend (who attempts to take the hero's place) is killed in battle. I must have heard some part of the story before the seventh grade. Rather than be depressed that I had created something unoriginal, I embraced the idea of writing a futuristic retelling of an ancient story. I then started several aborted attempts to write that story, but it kept coming up false.
There were several elements that I wanted to keep. In my script, the heroes had super powers because they were aliens who looked like humans (or the children of aliens). I have an opening scene of a group of rebels running away from a group of soldiers with explosions behind them. I developed an idea that the hero had been away from the planet (which I decided was a post-apocalyptic Earth) fighting a war, and that due to relativistic speeds was returning to a world where everyone he had know was dead. I also created a concept where the love of his life, required her daughters and then granddaughters to swear that one of them would be there for him on his return, an idea he doesn't know about. By the time he arrives, it's her great-great-granddaughter who wants nothing to do with the idea, but is convinced by the rebel leader to use this connection to get the war hero on their side.
I also have the idea of writing about the hero's experiences before he joins the rebels and wins independence for Earth. But then a friend of mine gave me a book that basically tells the story I wanted to write: of the people of Earth being the outcasts of a larger inter-species galactic war, but whose abilities start to set them apart.
These are ideas that I keep coming back to when I think about writing more fiction. Without the original script, I really don't know how much the story has evolved. However, I don't think I'll use the superpowers idea.
As I wrote my script, I came to realize that the props and sets I had planned would not work. For example, the fort I wanted to build would need multiple floors and corridors that would take up a much larger area than what the clearing I had planned to put it in would allow. Still, I finished the story anyway, and showed it to the other students at lunch as well as my English teacher. I was quite a hit. Even my friends liked it. Granted, I gave them all heroic roles and, in the end, they all had super powers. My teacher was also impressed and spoke with my mother about my potential.
I don't know what happened to that script. However, elements of the story have still rattled around in my thoughts and day dreams. When I read portions of the Iliad in the tenth grade, I was struck by some of the similarities between my hero (which was my role, of course) and Achilles's situation. Both were reluctant to fight because of a girl until a friend (who attempts to take the hero's place) is killed in battle. I must have heard some part of the story before the seventh grade. Rather than be depressed that I had created something unoriginal, I embraced the idea of writing a futuristic retelling of an ancient story. I then started several aborted attempts to write that story, but it kept coming up false.
There were several elements that I wanted to keep. In my script, the heroes had super powers because they were aliens who looked like humans (or the children of aliens). I have an opening scene of a group of rebels running away from a group of soldiers with explosions behind them. I developed an idea that the hero had been away from the planet (which I decided was a post-apocalyptic Earth) fighting a war, and that due to relativistic speeds was returning to a world where everyone he had know was dead. I also created a concept where the love of his life, required her daughters and then granddaughters to swear that one of them would be there for him on his return, an idea he doesn't know about. By the time he arrives, it's her great-great-granddaughter who wants nothing to do with the idea, but is convinced by the rebel leader to use this connection to get the war hero on their side.
I also have the idea of writing about the hero's experiences before he joins the rebels and wins independence for Earth. But then a friend of mine gave me a book that basically tells the story I wanted to write: of the people of Earth being the outcasts of a larger inter-species galactic war, but whose abilities start to set them apart.
These are ideas that I keep coming back to when I think about writing more fiction. Without the original script, I really don't know how much the story has evolved. However, I don't think I'll use the superpowers idea.
RSS Feed
