When you read my stories, I hope you can hear me.
Even if you’ve never spoken with me, you should be able to identify everything I write as being written by me.
That’s called a voice. Every writer has one. And if they don’t, well, they need to find theirs. It’s important. It’s how you immediately tell your readers that this belongs to you. They should be able to navigate your words without issue.
I don’t remember how or when I found mine. The only thing I really remember about my voice was back in college. A professor gave us an assignment: everyone has the same prompt, but you only get like 20 words or so to tell it. I think that’s called hint fiction? It’s like flash fiction but, you know, way shorter. Those were fun.
Anyway.
The catch was that no one got to sign their name to it. When the professor read the pieces aloud, it was up to the class to determine who had written those few words.
It was a small class, to be expected in a college creative writing course really, but still had just under 20 students. Maybe closer to 15? Regardless, I distinctly remember that only myself and a classmate of mine, whom I always saw as a rival, were the only ones who were immediately identified. Everyone else had some arguing amongst the class. Oh that’s him, oh that’s her.
Not for he and I. We were immediately caught. Which was the goal. That meant you had a voice.
That classmate was a rival in the way that Japanese cartoons and stuff treat them – someone you respect, might see some of yourself in, but desperately desire to beat them in virtually everything.
He was my Gary Oak. I tried so hard to not only be happy with my own work, which was and still is incredibly difficult even these roughly 10 years after that class, but also to impress the professors, as well as my rival.
We were on good terms. Cordial. Never really hung out too much together, despite shared interests in writing and video games and music and everything. I remember I went to his apartment once. I was downright flabbergasted he’d even invited me. That felt really great, like maybe I’d earned his respect too?
It was in a part of the city I never really went to, most of my friends lived on-campus like I did for my entire college life, but I remember it was dark and my only companions were the blazing white streetlamps guiding me along my path.
I think we only watched movies and talked about class and life and writing while tipping back whatever college students tipped back.
It was fun. And it’s funny that I can remember his name but haven’t reached out to ever catch up with him. That’s the kind of nostalgia that hurts the most and makes you the happiest – the kind that you can only remember and can never get back to.
But enough about that, there was also an update to the content here at chadabshire.com. The upside was that I felt both stories were, ah, pretty good I guess. The worst part was that Persona 5 hates when you share it with people.
So, on a Playstation 4, there’s a share button. Clicking that lets you save the current screen as a picture or to record the last few minutes of your gameplay. It’s a pretty great feature, because you can capture either some great-looking pictures or when you ask someone “did you just see that?” and they say no, you can let them see it. Like maybe a cool thing you did? I use it for funny bugs or glitches I run into. Once there was an extra horse in a school in The Last of Us when there really only should have been one horse.
That makes sense. I promise.
Digressions aside, that button exists. And you can use it, except when you can’t. Sometimes, and this is game specific, that button is disabled for whatever reason – usually to prevent story spoilers. As a result, you might have noticed scanlines on the main picture used in the Persona piece because I don’t have a capture card and I instead used my camera phone.
Ugh.
It killed me to use it, but it was the right picture to go with. The secondary picture in that article, surprisingly enough, the game let me capture that one. Not sure how it decides when and where and how I can do that, but whatever.
The next updates will hit when they are supposed to, July 10 and July 13, for the Storygank and Adventure, respectively. At present I’ve got a few ideas kicking around in the noggin, but nothing set firm. I’m not worried though – I’ve still got loads of stories worth telling.
Thanks for reading.