Undiscovered Talents

I would appreciate it if people who read my blog would like my "Rachel Zuhl" page on facebook. Not my personal page but my writer page. Thank you. I also have a "Party Like Jesus" page, but I haven't really been asking people to like that yet. You can if you want though.

So I am getting ready to make a book trailer for my memoir. My sister is big into film making so she is going to help me with it. In the book trailer, she will be interviewing me, but the entire thing is scripted. I wrote the script a few weeks ago. I tried to make it humorous. I am hoping it is not too confusing.

Anyway, so I was thinking about back when I first realized that I was delusional, back in early 2008. I mean, plenty of people had told me that I was delusional, but I didn't believe them because I knew better. I decided to make the best of this situation and write a book and become famous. Because I knew that when life gives you lemons, the smart thing to do is make lemonade. And I was pretty sure that I could make lemonade out of these lemons that life had given me.

I didn't know that I was any good at writing. In fact, in the beginning I was thinking about having it ghostwritten. Which is funny, because I think the only kind of people who get their books ghostwritten are famous people. Because if you're not famous and you're not a good enough writer to write a book then you can't have a book. But then I decided to write it myself, because I was on a writer's website and I read a comment from an author, an author who's book I had repeatedly seen on display at bookstores, saying that he didn't think his book would have been as successful as it was if he hadn't have written it himself.

It's kind of odd because I don't even see myself as that great of a writer but people act like I am. I originally decided to write not because I thought I would be good at it, but despite not being that great at it. It turns out though that I am good at it, apparently. I don't know what it is about my writing that is good. Maybe it is because I use a certain kind of humor, a certain kind of subtle humor. I don't really know.

I don't even read that much anymore. I used to read a lot when I was in fifth and sixth grades. Then I stopped. I would still read on occasion, but not nearly as much as I used to. Nowadays if I read I usually read nonfiction. And not usually memoirs. I can't even think of a single memoir I have actually finished reading off the top of my head.

My dad tells me that people who think they are really good at something, like writing, a lot of times aren't good at it at all. They don't know good writing, they lack both the skill to write well and the skill to assess their writing properly.

Striking Gold Without Picking Your Nose

So my mom tells me I should write fiction. She tells me my blog is just so great, and that when I was taken to the hospital for the first time, the guy who interviewed me about what I believed told her that I should be a fiction writer, because he was impressed by what I told him, despite the fact that it wasn't true.

I didn't know that the guy said this, my mom just told me this yesterday. But it made me very glad that other people appreciated the greatness of my delusions, and it was funny to think he said this even though at that time I hadn't even figured everything out yet so there were massive holes in the story.

The thing is, the time when I became delusional was the time I struck gold. I came up with an awesome story, although it is not without plot holes, I don't think any of them are massive enough that they couldn't be smoothed over and the story couldn't be made into a movie. But I was in quite a bit of a different state when I came up with this, I was the most fucked up on life at that point and I wasn't even on anything (unusual). I kind of think it wasn't even me who came up with this story, I was just somehow tapping into a higher source. All the loose ends tie together in the end, like they do in any good story. That's what fiction is about: coming up with a bunch of events that follow a pattern and create a bunch of loose ends that tie together in the end, in a way that leaves you with a feeling of victory and has some sort of lesson about life. My delusions have all that.

Most of the time, I'm not that great at writing fiction. Coming up with stories isn't my creative strength. My creative strength comes out when I program computer games, and I come up with ways to model real life phenomena amongst a colony of virtual bugs. It's freaking awesome. But when it comes to fictional stories, I'm not good at coming up with stuff that's original and not stupid.

So two years ago I was writing a fictional story based on my delusions, like how it could have been if my delusions were true. I decided it made the story stronger if the main character (who wasn't me) told stupid lies all the time. Don't ask. So I would have him say something strange, and I was cracking myself up with the stuff I came up with. Then afterwards, every time, the person whom he was talking to would say, "interesting." Every time. It was a little thing I had going.

But I got frustrated. I had a lot of dialogue, but in every scene it was people talking about their majors (because it took place in college). Sure college students talk about their majors, but they talk about other things too. What do I have them talk about? I don't know! Guys by themselves. What do guys by themselves talk about when there aren't any girls around? How am I supposed to know? Yet I am somehow supposed to make the dialogue sound realistic and true to life. In order to be any good at this, I would have to spend a great deal of time observing people and their dialogue in the real world.

As I'm sitting here thinking, I'm remembering a time when I was a freshman in high school and I wrote a story about a teenage girl going on a camping trip with her family that people liked. The thing that people liked about it was the voice of the girl, not the plot, the plot kind of sucked. For people who don't know voice in writing refers to when something is told from a certain person's perspective, the sense of personality of the person you get based on the way they talk and the stuff they say.

So anyway, maybe I should focus on middle grade fiction for girls.