"Old-school Tess"

I first imagined Novella sometime in my sophomore year of college. Actually, I first imagined the character of Novella.

I was returning from a shopping trip with one of my closest friends. We often went on shopping trips on the weekend given the "uncivilized" nature of our college town. We were accustomed to living in the cities, and having a wide variety of capitalist distractions to choose from. To get anywhere near those shops, we had to drive 40 minutes to an hour and a half through corn fields and rural highways. On the return trip we began to toss an idea back and forth, tentatively named "Chaos High School".

The general concept of the idea was a school in which nearly everything was possible. Most of the story involved a group of students which happened to be magic users. It was the very thing that our anime soaked brains would devour quickly and readily. I began to craft my own character for the story. An androgynous character who came into the possession of a special pen that had the power to control fate.

The character is unaware at first of the power this pen conceals. After using the pen to write several journal entries, things begin to happen to several of the students in the school. When the pen is linked to these incidents, the character attempts to correct things with more entries. The results are even more disastrous. In the end, the character breaks the pen hoping to put an end to it all.

After my friend had lost interest in the idea, the character lingered, along with the name "Novella". I decided to develop my subplot into something in or itself. It sounded like a good idea at the time. I began to draw the character, designing clothing, hair, and face. The story might even have been developed, if my life hadn't taken such a dramatic turn at the time.

What followed that time was a terrible year of depression, manipulation, and loss of will to live. The story changed to reflect what I had felt at the time. The original concept of a pen that controls fate was dropped completely. Instead, a suicidal music lover named Akisa, and a gregarious blond girl called Miki were added to the cast. The story wasn't set at a high school of magic users, but in a Midwestern college. Over the next few years the story became darker. Eventually it wasn't so much a story as it was a form of emotional expression.

When I attempted to write the story in the latter half of 2002, it quickly fell apart. There were so many problems with the script that I didn't even know what I was doing with it after 24 short episodes. Now I was a college graduate, and I felt I was at rock-bottom. I had a degree, something few in my family possess, but I couldn't get better work than making donuts at 4am in a gas station. Although I didn't realize it, my life was about to take another radical turn -- but this time it was for the better.

That was just over three years ago. In the last year I've been working on the story once more. It's gone through two revisions, three in just over a few days. While the "3rd" revision was a lackluster affair just to get my thoughts together, the 4th was a palpable effort. I had worked on it nearly every evening without fail for weeks. I released it onto the Internet just before 10pm on my deadline date. I was expecting that revision 5 would be similar. That I'd be able to attain that amount of focus and seriously expand the ouline. Instead, I've been unable to focus. The story doesn't seem as vibrant as it once was.

I've barely been able to work on the outline for weeks now. My mind seems to simply lock up when I make the attempt. "Why?" I often ask myself, "Why does this happen when everything went so well before?"

I cannot connect with the story the way I once did. I've been puzzling over this for a while now, wondering just what I had lost. Throughout the history of Novella, I connected the most with Akisa. She matched so much of my feelings for so long that it was easy to personify them in the form of a character. Likewise, Miki and Novella are personifications of different groups of emotions and experiences. While I identify with these two characters as well, it's still Akisa that reigns supreme.

While I still sometimes connect with her, I admit that it's been more and more difficult the last year. I'm no longer the same person that I was when I first created the story in college. Without that connection, I often feel I should abandon the entire effort. My writing and my artwork seem lackluster when I'm not "good and depressed". One of my friends has encouraged me to think that is nothing but stereotype. While the story is very "old-school Tess", there are "less intense" reasons to continue to work on Novella.

And I agree with her.

The problem, as I've discovered, is that the purpose of the story no longer matches the person I am. My lack of connectivity with the characters is a result of that discrepancy. If I continue to work on Novella in the manner that I did before, I'll never complete it to my satisfaction. What I need isn't a character or a subplot. I need to find a new -- or in the least, additional -- purpose for the story. I need to answer the question, "Why am I writing this?" When I answer that question, I believe the story will be better and more easily written.