Writing Begins (and Never Ends)

I’m sure if I did some serious detective work I could figure out when exactly I wrote the first chapter of Jirale, but one thing I do know is that it must have been during Grade 10 (2000-2001) and a period of time (maybe as long as a year, but perhaps no more than a couple months) passed before Kat attached herself to the project and I began work on the rest of the story.

Let me be absolutely clear about something. I never would have gotten past chapter one without Kat. There are no if and or buts about this. If Kat hadn’t offered to start drawing Jirale it simply would have faded away as something I plan to finish one day, instead of becoming the main obsession of my life. However, the first chapter I did manage on my own, so let’s go back to that for a minute.

The idea for Jirale had been bouncing around in my head for awhile, and I had tried once or twice to start it (including a rather embarrassing attempt to tell the story with stick-figure in lieu of a real artist), but I never really had the inspiration to dive in – until I had an Escaflowne marathon with my older sits Sonya. To give you an idea of what Escaflowne is, here’s a fan-made music video:

I took a lot from Escaflowne. I don’t mean I took characters or story from it, but I definitely stole the devices it used for story-telling. The constant use of dreams and ghosts is something that comes up again and again in my own novel. I think the action/gore is also similar. The tone and a lot of the visuals really stand out to me as I re-watch this anime. The flying ship, the katanas, Hitomi’s crystal, the young man with angel wings, a lot of it showed up consciously or unconsciously in Jirale.

And yeah, the two biggest inspirations for this story involve mechas, and yet not a single mecha is anywhere to be found in my own novel. Of course, the other thing influencing how I wrote Jirale was this:

Basically, how I started my “career” as a writer was way back in elementary school. I would take notes on games I played with my friends. I would draw maps, invent languages, maths, write out family trees. I would write pages and pages on background stuff. In junior high I kept doing this, and in lieu of acting out this stuff with friends (which is still socially acceptable when you’re in Grade 6), I would begin to write short mythologies from these worlds. It wasn’t until I got into Tolkien that I realized I could apply my love of inventing worlds with a proper narration, a novel if you will. Writing Jirale coincided with The Lord of the Rings trilogy coming to film, so it was front and centre in my mind when I started writing it, meaning once Kat said she’d draw the comic, I got really excited and created more background information than I knew what to do with… and maybe I’ll write about that another day, when I’m not so drowsy on oxycodone.

Evolution of an Idea

After writing that post about Jirale I started thinking about how I wrote it, specifically just how much the idea changed before I actually started writing anything.

People like to ask writers where their ideas come from, and I know most writers have a hard time answering. I think it’s quite rare that writer’s actually remember when and how they get an idea. I don’t remember when and how I thought of Jirale, but I do remember where I got it from. I got it from this:

Gundam fucking Wing.

And those of you who are familiar with this wonderful example of 90s homoerotic mecha anime, and with Jirale which is a fantasy dealing with religion, racial segregation and vengeance, might be wondering wtf this:

has to do with this:

Jirale began its life as an idea for a mecha anime. A lot of what I had in mind has long since been forgotten, but the basic plot involved a young mech-unit pilot (this evolved into Ichitake) crash-landing, meeting what I had envisioned as a blonde huntress (who became the Asian Cheng-I) to guide the pilot to safety. There were a few other plot points that have survived in some form in the current novel, but basically where Jirale ends is the halfway point of this original story.

By the time the idea had changed time periods, the second half of the plot (which involved a clone of the Ichitake character – which is where that one on her forehead originally came from, by the by) no longer fit, and so it was completely cut. On a side note, I actually took this second half of the story and used it to plot out a completely different comic idea, though I only ever wrote an outline for it.

Some of what I just wrote remained in the plot of Jirale, like the crash-landing (now from a flying ship), Cheng-I does sort of play the role as guide through most of the novel, and the main antagonist and the search for the armour remained. And of course, the braid…

Duo Maxwell from Gundam Wing and Geiru Mizuno From Jirale. Magic!

How did the idea change so drastically? I have no bloody idea. Keep in mind this thought process took place in 2000. I think I wrote this post not in an attempt to figure that out, but just to share how ideas can form for a writer, and how sometimes the idea you sit down to write has nothing to do with the novel you end up producing.

Jirale

Today I finished writing a novel that took me very nearly half my life to write (13 years. I’m 27). That being said, it’s still what you’d consider a first draft (or like a fourteenth, depending on how you look at it). Also, I didn’t actually spend 13 years writing this novel, I spent five. Allow me to explain:

I got the idea for this novel, Jirale, in Grade 9 when I was 14-years-old. It was an idea that rattled around in my head for a few months until it was completely unrecognizable from what had first appeared in my mind. Around Thanksgiving in Grade 10 I started to write it – not intending to write it as a novel (though this was something I had attempted before, though had yet to finish one), but as a manga, or a Japanese comic. This is obviously pretty good proof that at the tender age of 15 I clearly didn’t really understand what a manga was.

The big problem with my plan was that I couldn’t draw. My very best was such:

The first picture ever drawn of Ichitake, circa October 2000

Thanks to kismet (and the Internet) I hooked up with Kat Verhoeven who volunteered her burgeoning talents to my little project – which turned into a very large and time-consuming project. To put it mildly, I was obsessed with this story. I was drawing tons of maps, crappy doodles and writing pages of history. I kept writing side stories and plotted out several sequels, prequels, and unrelated stories that took place in the same land. Pretty much everything was just seen by me, though some I shared with Kat and anyone else who showed interest in my story.

Jirale was “successfully” launched online. And, although honestly the writing embarrasses me a little these days, I don’t mind telling people they can read the comic here, because I think it’s interesting to see how a thing has grown (though this presupposes that you’ll read the novel one day).

I’m not entirely sure how long it took me to write all 26 chapters of Jirale, but I probably finished before I started Grade 12. I think it took between one or two years. Strange not to remember such a thing… I can tell you for certain that the comic stopped mid-January, 2004, in the middle of Chapter 10. Like I said, this project got big, and Kat unfortunately didn’t have time for it.

So Jirale slept. Sometimes I would open it up, play around with the short stories, work on the sequel, or try to find a new artist to take over. But it faded into the background. I wrote a lot of other things in the the years that followed, finishing several novels (and novellas) and a couple short stories just to sweeten the deal. And I went to college, where I learned a lot more about the practical side of writing.

In the spring of 2008, after spending five years becoming a much more competent writer, I was suddenly possessed to turn the comic Jirale into the novel Jirale. I had attempted this once before, and the results were… erk. I tried to stick too close to the comics. This time, I let myself really shred them. I was a really shitty writer in high school (though thank god no one ever told me that!), and completely rewrote everything, just keeping the plot.

It’s sitting pretty at nearly 131,000 words right now, but I think about and 100,000 of those were written in the first few weeks. I wrote a chapter a day, until around chapter 18. Then I skipped ahead and wrote the last two chapters. After that I worked on it sporadically, chipping away at it.

And over five years later… I’m done. Now, I’ve gone over this novel a dozen times, but for the first time ever I’ll be able to sit down at read it without any gaps. Not to mention, after five years, and a trip to university, I can say with a lot of confidence, that my writing is better than it was in 2008, meaning I might be able to competently edit this one.

There is much editing in my future, and who knows what after that, but I just wanted to write this down. This is one of those momentous occasions in a person’s life, an ambitious project (nearly) coming to fruition. It may not now or ever be significant to anyone other than me, but I wanted to share it with you nonetheless… because it feels kinda cool :)