Kendall Powell
High School Junior
August/September 2024
In sixth-grade history class, the teacher required us to write a story based on the Industrial Revolution. I spent nights on the Thesaurus searching for suitable synonyms for every word, watching videos, and reading articles about the time period. Ava noticed my eagerness to write because she would come into my yellow room and lay on my bed, watching me peck my keyboard on my desk.
"I cannot think of a name for my characters!" I groaned into my hands as I swiveled in my chair in defeat.
"Just use a name generator," My sister replied.
Following her advice, I Googled a name generator and used the first one. The website obtained every name in existence. Galleries of people and stories that could be told and brought to life with just a few words. Yet, after two days, the best I could come up with were unimaginative: Rose Weller and Jack Williams.
"Isn't that copyrighted?" Ava asked from her own desk in her room, where she was working on her story, "You know, from the Titanic."
"Crap!" I smack my hands across my face while I roll out of her bed, "You're telling me that it took me two days to reinvent the Titanic?"
"Is it going to take you another two days to come up with different names," my sister pestered.
I glanced down, "It's just an assignment, it does not matter."
"Of course it does!" my sister countered. "You've been so engrossed in it all week. Don't give up on this story."
She joined me on the floor. We both pressed our backs on the wooden frame of her bed, and she pulled out her phone and opened Pinterest. “Look at my boards for all my characters. They are more than my book; they are an extension of myself—the people I love, people I hate, and the things I love most about our world."
She continued to scroll through her various boards as I began to see writing in a new light, "This might be just an assignment, one that might not even be remembered. But watching you this past week made me realize how much talent you have for writing. Don't deny it, you know how good you are at this. Keep writing, even after this assignment is done."
The next day my sister bought me a black notebook with a stained glass design embroidered on the front. Ava showed me how to set up my notebook, which should be used to characterize my list of people and chapter summaries to build my world. We would spend hours in her room listening to many bands I had never been exposed to. She would tell me how much she loved her boyfriend, Sam. The drama about her friends. The bad, the good, and the ugly.
"I love my boyfriend," my sister said while doodling in her notebook, "He is a gift from God. I think he is the one."
I rolled my eyes. Foolish teenage love.
I wanted to write like my sister. Nevertheless, the due date for my project was soon, and I had enough of writing it. I put in so much work for a solid four pages. I wanted to expand my work. I tried to. But every time I opened up the story, I lost motivation. I decided to end it with a time skip, tie up loose ends, and call it good.
I submitted my assignment and got an A. That was the first time I truly valued the writing process. My mom showed my family, and everyone was astonished. I drowned in a pool of compliments and pride. Everyone begged me to do this as a career and to finish the "book."
Despite the positive affirmations, I did not want to continue the story. I wanted to create my world, not be stuck in this one. So, I would lie face down on my sister's scratchy carpet every night and truly listen to her writing process. Her first story, the one she created then, was about a maze in a school. Another story was about characters who traveled multiple dimensions. She'd show me her Pinterest every week. I melted into her bed, truly visualizing her music and analyzing every lyric. Each applied to new aspects I wanted to incorporate into something.
Over the next few months, I would still go down to her room. We were making progress for a while, writing stories, until one day, something terrible happened. Her boyfriend broke up with her. I spent nights sitting on her floor while she cried all night. She kept screaming at me, asking if anything was wrong with her. She would rip her hair out, throw pillows, and keep old photos of Sam in her desk drawer. She never left her room. She never made an effort to talk to me.
We lived in the same house, yet I only saw Ava at dinner. She was always in her room, sleeping or watching YouTube in her bed. She did nothing else. Her bed was her coffin for the next year until she graduated. When Ava left for college, It felt no different from the past year when she was here. Because I never saw her. All I had from her was a curse of creativity. Something I can never use. When she stopped writing, I stopped writing.
Even though I stopped writing, the idea of writing festered in my imagination for years. It consumed my life and consciousness. Though I tried to write, it was never the same without my sister.
That was my cursed fate until one night in my freshman year, boredom loomed over me like a blanket. My parents were asleep, and my sister was gone. Make a map. Make your world real. So I ran downstairs with my notebook and poured rice on one of the empty pages. I traced the outline of the shapes the rice assorted into and created my world. It was perfect. It was mine.
The college Ava attended forced her to go home for Thanksgiving break, and I had a surprise. My surprise was the map that remained inside my black notebook. I took it out, and Ava was shocked. She asked me about my world and how I made the map.
Ava said gleefully, "I also have a surprise." She smiled and pulled out something from her bag—a notebook. I gasped. I thought she had given up writing a long time ago.
"Can I look inside?" I questioned.
She nodded, and as I peered, I saw the stoic characters I grew up getting to know through my sister's stories—monsters and worlds I missed from many years ago. There was her character Hopi, the maze, and even the monsters. Even after all these years, I could not have been more proud of my sister for sticking with writing. I was brought back to sitting in her room, coming up with her stories and my characters. Listening to each other rant for hours. One tear welled up in my eyes. Without even realizing it, we mirrored each other. We both could never escape from writing.
I learned how to write from nights spent with my sister Ava. No matter how much time we spend away from writing, we are so intertwined with our stories that nothing can forever hold us from the writing process forever.
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