How It Began

I’m a Jamaican writer that once dreamed of becoming a successful author and failed to do that.

My first stint into writing was never novels. It was comics.

When I attended Calabar High school, I used to create these comics.

These comics were either fan fictions or variations of what I liked to watch. That mostly included anime and cartoons.

I would draw these comics and they're were my first foray into that area.

Naturally, I started hanging with other artists from that school and they were better than me. This motivated me to get good at art and I did get better as time went on.

At one point, I created a comic that even included my friends in it and it did cause some intrigue within my class. There were a few friends that would tell me ‘I want my character to do this’ and ‘have this power’ and so on. That was not the only thing I did though. I even created games.

There was this makeshift racing game where we used the slipping of pens to dictate distance and direction. Another was a board rpg game where I made warriors of my friends and we took turns fighting through challenges.

Looking back, I realized I was a creative person. A lot of that creativity was nice for the moment but I never did much with it. Most of those art books i did most of those comics and art pieces in are sitting in a corner of my room collecting dust.

My dream for the latter part of high school and after I left it was to become an artist, not a writer.

So I wanted to attend Edna Manley University. A institution that specializes in the teaching of performing, visual and musical arts.

That never happened, because life happened. One of the hard facts I struggled to learn was that nobody cared about dreams.

What mattered in a capitalistic society was what commodity could be offered In exchange for the value we put into cash, money, the denominations we all store value in. High school did not prepare me well enough for this reality.

I was top graded student in my class but failed out of high school.

My next destination was Portmore Community College to gain some more CXC’s.

CXC stands for Caribbean Examination Council. It is the foremost exam through which adolescent students grade their skills and knowledge gained from their time in high school.

It is how you get into most universities and it is used to grade your intelligence socially. The more CXCs you get, the smarter you are and the more people will say, ‘Him a bright boy!’.

After I got a better collection of CXC's, (one of my few achievements).

Everything after that was one big screw-up after another.

And if you think this story of my life is useless to learning how to write or worldbuild, don't be so quick to push aside human experience.

All human experiences matter.

It is human emotions, actions that are replicated by writers for their characters. Those human interactions and beliefs make up a community which drives a society, the essential building blocks of a world.

You cannot write well unless you understand humans and humanity.

The reasons why humans do things is what makes a character memorable or a world, fantastic.

Here's why, the reason I made so many screwups is because of my big ego.

The funny thing is if you ask someone who knew me back then, they would tell you I was a nice quiet smart child.

But let's say you're a YouTuber that analyzes stories for a living and look at my behavior, what do you see?

A quiet person. Sure, that's true.

Nice and kind, those words can be used to describe me.

Smart, I have shown that from time to time.

That's only the surface.

Deep down, I was deeply arrogant, lackadaisical, low in self-worth and esteem, a people-pleaser, and fragile in my personal viewpoint.

My behavior shows that, this is why editors and analysts look at a character's behavior to tell who they really are.

You could say I'm an inconsistent character.

Me, the writer wrote a character that was supposed to be smart, brave and kind. That's how the story might frame me.

Unfortunately, an editor could easily recognize that I wrote a character that is egotistical and self-righteous, not as brave as he shrunk in important situations and kind only when something is expected in return.

An inconsistent character.

That's me.

It's funny how I wrote a glamorous life for myself in my mind.

I wanted to be a great author, own a car and a big house, be an amazing person that everyone would respect and love.

Instead, I'm a college dropout, I don't know how to drive, can't fix a pipe, a failure at almost everything I've done, most of my family hates me and I work a dead end job at the bottom of society where I'm called an idiot on the daily.

What happened?

Well, stick around, we’re going to talk about how I ruined my life due to my humongous ego and how I'm making It better.

I learned how to write stories and craft characters, their arcs, their struggles and their triumphs.

At no point did I realize that I was good at writing characters in a book but never writing a good life for myself.

Why should anyone read the struggles of my characters if I couldn't overcome my own and become a better person?

I was too arrogant and couldn't see the forests from the trees.

It took me years to learn how to write a character properly in novels.

Pretty much the same amount of time it took me to learn that I was the problem in my own life. I needed to take responsibility for that.

That story ended with a negative arc, you know the arcs where the protagonist fails and learns a valuable lesson? It's time for the sequel and I'm not the main character this time, but my story isn't done yet.

As the side character in the sequel, my role is to put aside my ego and help the protagonist, whoever they may.

I’m still writing that story.