Assignment 6- Swazey Sexton- Passions Abound

For a long time now, I've been in love stories and the art of story telling. At first, all I wanted to do was create random characters and plots for horrible and confusing story lines. I wrote short stories, poems, and so many other kinds of stories. I've bounced from one story teller career idea to the next, and I've enjoyed such and every one of them.

Developing stories has never been hard for me. I've always been able to run wild with creative ability and been able to fabricate ideas on the spot without a moments hesitation. The first story I ever wrote was in 5th grade, it was a story of me and my friends at the time being destined brothers from a dream land in which we had to unite to conquer the evils plaguing the real world. The structure and grammar was poor, the pace of the plot jumped from being too slow to too fast, and I couldn't decide whether I wanted it to be a children's book or a YA novel, so carrying language and imagery was used. It was awful. Absolutely dreadful. But it was fun, and it made me happy to create such an in depth story (to me at least) and complete it. Then came middle school, where every other month I was working on a different story idea. I committed to a story  in 7th grade where I took a collection of my friends and placed them in a  post apocalyptic world, where a new form of element restructured the human genes upon contact, giving them certain abilities amd changing prominent features like hair color and eye color to one of six different color schemes. In hindsight it was very cringey and poorly written, but my friends who read it enjoyed it a lot, they enjoyed the story I created and enjoyed seeing themselves reflected in a story. The list continues on and on and on with these novels, short stories and concepts. They never ended, until I gave up on stories. There was a brief moment where I couldn't see stories as a possibility in my life I thought I needed something more concrete. And then came along Table top RPG's and actual prominent board games. They introduced a whole new medium of story telling. Games like Zombicide, Sheriff of Nottingham, DnD, Catan, Munchkin, they all had a unique story being told in such an interactive format. I now live for this medium. I can't get enough.

My story telling and love for (especially my love for the dark, gritty, and occult) is mainly all thanks to the lovely man by the name Edgar Allen Poe. Amd while the stories like the Raven, and tell tale heart are always good, my favorite is The Cask of Amontillado. A story where a hateful man lures a prideful companion down into his wine cellar, constantly getting him drunk off of the wine on the walls, and then at end when there is no Cask there, he ties chains around him and seals a wall around him, trapping him deep within the catacombs forever. Even the most pure and innocent wording in the story felt so dark and different, it was wonderful. And that's why now, all my stories and ideas have some level of simplistic evilness lying under them,  simply because of how much that piece has impacted my views on stories.