American Icon

My Playground
The princess was on another planet, but I didn’t know that. All I knew was that I had to make my way to the top of this mountain without dying… again. I had played through this level at least ten times now, each with just a fraction of progress. I was getting mad, but I didn’t want to put down the controller because I was afraid that there wouldn’t be a princess left to save.
I didn’t think about it at the time, but I had played through this game at least a thousand times, and I never got tired of it. I would walk away from this game thinking to myself what it would be like if I could actually travel through space with a robot, and save an intergalactic princess who was taken by a brain in a television set. I would run around in my white helmet throwing around these little cartoon bombs that would make enemies shatter into a hundred pieces. As I grew older, I found that memories were fewer and fewer apart with other games; perhaps it was just a sense of maturity that took over?
Later on I always caught myself reminiscing those days where I would sit in my room, lost in the world that these people had created. I remember wishing that I could go back to that time just so I could be so absorbed in it the way I used to be. Eventually, I started writing. I wrote stories that were mixed with reality of people and emotions, but exaggerated like the games I used to play. I found that it wasn’t working; the two genres were just too different for one story. I decided that if I was going to be a successful writer, then I would have to stick with a single theme. So I tried my hand at writing a dramatic story about a boy and a girl, I wasn’t expecting anything big since this kind of story is so overused, but I found it to be one of the best pieces that I wrote.
This is an excerpt from that story: As they sat from each other, worlds apart, they could both feel the power of the other. Making all conversation absolutely pointless, they could feel each others emotions just by examining the other, along with every thought they've ever had, every memory they remembered, every hope and dream they've had and will have. All could be seen, just by the bond they shared.
I remember one of my original stories was about a boy that woke up one day to see that he had super powers. There was a point where one of my friends had asked me one day “When are you going to write more chapters to your story?” Until that day, I hadn’t thought that anyone was actually following what I wrote. I had always thought that people were reading it leisurely, as I always did with writing. I never continued the series that my friend mentioned, but instead started a new series that wasn’t so typically written. It wasn’t about a boy in high school getting superpowers; it was about a killer who wanted revenge. Understandably, this isn’t entirely original either, but I was much more proud of it than I was the first story that I had written.
The longer I wrote, the more I thought. I thought more and more about how I was trying to connect my readers to the characters in the story. I always sort of compared my writing to the little movies I had in my head when I would play a game, and when I realized that, I realized that what I wanted to do, was inspire. I wanted to inspire someone to dream with my writing, just like I did when I played that game so long ago. I wanted people to see my work, and think to themselves: “Wow, I wish I could be in a world like that.” I want people to put themselves in the place of my character and change the story to their liking, I want activate people’s imaginations and let it run wild in my playground. I want people to think that they were the ones saving the princess, not me. I want others to enjoy the childhood they have, whether they’re still a child or not.