Fiction, Nonfiction, & How My Writing Has Changed

I remember the times when fantasy and science fiction were my forté. I would get home from school, play some video games with friends until the evening, and then sit down and write until the early hours of the morning, before going to bed and repeating it all again the next day. I immersed myself in these original worlds of my own design, filled with dynamic characters and fantastic events. It was what I lived and breathed for. It was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

And then, as high school moved on and I started to phase my writing into modern, young adult fiction, I found fantasy and sci-fi less and less appealing. I wrote the first draft of Elephants in the Living Room... and then didn't write anything of consequence for years. Short stories, essays, film and game reviews, these came easy to me. They were short, required less commitment, and we're fairly easy to push out whenever was convenient for me. It was simple and it was a way for me to continue to exercise my writing while exploring other activities to fill my off-time.

However, now I find the best way for me to explore my writing has become in the nonfiction genre. Blog posts and journaling, or writing the rules and notes for my gaming sessions, were all I did when it came to creative writing. This became very apparent to me these last few days.

I sat down to work on my recent creative writing fiction piece that I had started last November and hadn't touched since the end of 2013. However I simply couldn't find my voice for fantasy fiction anymore. Yet, the events of the last couple of days made me realize that the desire to write nonfiction about certain aspects of my life, aspects I hadn't given much thought to, yet had commanded much of my time over the last decade. And so I'll give myself the opportunity to sit down and at least start writing a nonfiction piece, that will be a fun exploration of how certain activities, specifically multiplayer video games, had impacted my self-image, my career choices, and the general path of my life. We'll see how the project goes, but I'm not certain how far into it I will get, especially with so many other projects in the works so far.