So I helped with a Tae Kwon Do test today. The kid's one of the most-talented individuals we have in our school, with incredibly-precise technique.
During the test, though, I remembered a couple of oooooooooooooooooooooooold story ideas I have involving martial arts. The first I remember coming up with the idea as a kid, where the antagonist was someone I saw as me drunk on the dark side, and the protagonist was my middle-aged teacher, just with alterations.
Think, martial arts (with a touch of, say, street fighter) meets Jedi vs Sith in that there was a rage within my character that I let loose rather than learning to control it. I don't think that I ever wrote a word of it, in part because as a kid, I didn't think I had the skill to write the narrative. (I was right. No way would an idea that good have survived the touch of an incompetent barely-teenager.)
I have the skill now, with some plot rewriting to focus on the martial arts schools and why they're so important (my character was, while the antagonist, loosely speaking sympathetic), and whatnot. It was a neat idea which I'm utterly failing to describe the power of. Maybe some other time I'll be able to explain it better.
The other idea, though, was roughly a contemporary (maybe a year later, but in the same timeframe for sure), and yet, it was the prize of my writing skill at the time. (If I looked now, I might cringe, but it's possible I might not. When I say it was the best thing I had written at the time...I mean it; that story's prologue was one of THE largest evolutions in storytelling I made around that time, in spite of it being a story I've nearly entirely forgot about.)
Now, mind you...while I planned a ton of things...I only got to write the prologue since I lacked the skill to actually write a story on the scale I had planned. It was one of the first stories I wrote to feature the idea of 'student against academy', though in this case, it was 'single student against entire world'. I had planned a whole fantasy realm, one of the first I had created entirely from my own mind without inspiration from Artix Entertainment, meaning I was significantly outclassed.
To this day, I'm not sure I'd be able to write it, in spite of how good it was. It was a unique idea. The prologue showed the villain killing the protagonist's parents when the protagonist was an infant in the house. Fairly standard, yes, but the writing was incredibly-sharp (and surprisingly so) for me at the time. The story would then pick up with who found the protagonist, his martial arts master, and how he was trained in the martial arts while he genetically has the ability to become a 'healer', a now-thought-extinct Class. (With classes being things you'd expect: archers, mages, martial artists, you get the idea. Healers were the best of the best at healing, though, and he and the antagonist are the last ones, with the antagonist having engineered the world to see the antagonist as their only savior...when the protagonist is going down a path that can prove that wrong.)
I'm...not even close to explaining the story well enough. Again, I hope that I'll be able to explain it better at a later time. Because that idea now that it's resurfaced is never going to go away. (For instance, one unique aspect of the protagonist is that he's got black scars covering his entire body that make him prone to overheating or vulnerable to freezing--forget which--and he had to undergo special training to turn that weakness into a strength.)
Tonight's movie night, so I don't think I'll be able to really describe things anymore. GAH. I had them in mind so clearly, they're still there, but my ability to describe them has gone out the window. :/
During the test, though, I remembered a couple of oooooooooooooooooooooooold story ideas I have involving martial arts. The first I remember coming up with the idea as a kid, where the antagonist was someone I saw as me drunk on the dark side, and the protagonist was my middle-aged teacher, just with alterations.
Think, martial arts (with a touch of, say, street fighter) meets Jedi vs Sith in that there was a rage within my character that I let loose rather than learning to control it. I don't think that I ever wrote a word of it, in part because as a kid, I didn't think I had the skill to write the narrative. (I was right. No way would an idea that good have survived the touch of an incompetent barely-teenager.)
I have the skill now, with some plot rewriting to focus on the martial arts schools and why they're so important (my character was, while the antagonist, loosely speaking sympathetic), and whatnot. It was a neat idea which I'm utterly failing to describe the power of. Maybe some other time I'll be able to explain it better.
The other idea, though, was roughly a contemporary (maybe a year later, but in the same timeframe for sure), and yet, it was the prize of my writing skill at the time. (If I looked now, I might cringe, but it's possible I might not. When I say it was the best thing I had written at the time...I mean it; that story's prologue was one of THE largest evolutions in storytelling I made around that time, in spite of it being a story I've nearly entirely forgot about.)
Now, mind you...while I planned a ton of things...I only got to write the prologue since I lacked the skill to actually write a story on the scale I had planned. It was one of the first stories I wrote to feature the idea of 'student against academy', though in this case, it was 'single student against entire world'. I had planned a whole fantasy realm, one of the first I had created entirely from my own mind without inspiration from Artix Entertainment, meaning I was significantly outclassed.
To this day, I'm not sure I'd be able to write it, in spite of how good it was. It was a unique idea. The prologue showed the villain killing the protagonist's parents when the protagonist was an infant in the house. Fairly standard, yes, but the writing was incredibly-sharp (and surprisingly so) for me at the time. The story would then pick up with who found the protagonist, his martial arts master, and how he was trained in the martial arts while he genetically has the ability to become a 'healer', a now-thought-extinct Class. (With classes being things you'd expect: archers, mages, martial artists, you get the idea. Healers were the best of the best at healing, though, and he and the antagonist are the last ones, with the antagonist having engineered the world to see the antagonist as their only savior...when the protagonist is going down a path that can prove that wrong.)
I'm...not even close to explaining the story well enough. Again, I hope that I'll be able to explain it better at a later time. Because that idea now that it's resurfaced is never going to go away. (For instance, one unique aspect of the protagonist is that he's got black scars covering his entire body that make him prone to overheating or vulnerable to freezing--forget which--and he had to undergo special training to turn that weakness into a strength.)
Tonight's movie night, so I don't think I'll be able to really describe things anymore. GAH. I had them in mind so clearly, they're still there, but my ability to describe them has gone out the window. :/
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