So, I really like to pretend I’m a good creative writer (even though I’m really not) and I’ve been craving to start writing this story (which I won’t because I’m too lazy) with kind’ve has the basic archetypal structure as Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey. But, sadly, I like getting stuck on secondary characters rather than main characters because secondary characters are always more interesting than the main character. Like, for instance, I really want to make one of the character’s to have a cheesy story at first, but then unfold into this internal train wreck that starts to become (as the books grow) too real for a ten year old to handle (but hey! By the time that happens, the ten year old should be a sixteen year old, so it’ll be okay). Anyways, heres sorta the archetypal idea:

He (the secondary character) is going to be the main character’s half brother named James Spartan who starts as an antagonist. He’s a young guy, and he has a cheesy incentive that has to do with saving somebody (probably would be his long-lost mother or something) who assumed to be dead for many years now but he’s obsessed with the idea so he is willing to kill the ‘prince’ to find her. While the main character is on his journey to realizing he is the prince of this underwater world, his half-brother (who doesn’t know he’s his half-brother. Again, cliché!) will be on his own dark journey trying to save his mother. This cliché idea will slowly disappear though and shift into something bigger. The real point though, in the end, is I want to show the manipulation in youth. I want to show abuse through this character as he grows older. I want to show ruthlessness, I want to show war, I want to sexism, I want to show abandonment. I want to show every piece of darkness that is possible for a young person to feel before he explodes, and then make him rise from the ashes.

But then, after I fill my bedroom wall with a thousand sticky notes, I started to ask myself: how do I know all of this darkness? How do I, a high school student, understand  how it feels without really feeling it? Nora lives in this Doll House where she is manipulated to feel happy. She is smiling all the time, she is proud of her family, she loves the relationship with her husband and her role in the world. But in the end, she really doesn't know her role. She realizes when she leaves that she doesn'tknow who she is. She doesn’t know what happiness truly feels like. Instead, she is told what it feel s like so she adopts those feelings and tells herself that they are her own. And I believe that’s how writers are: they are told what it feels like, so they build their own imaginary doll house and create characters that live that way. They don’t have to feel it to understand it. They just have  to be able to imagine the look in the character’s eyes as they fall apart, or be able to illustrate the young secondary character rising from under the ashes. They just need to reenact a visual, just as Nora had.