A Realistic Topic With a Hint of Fantasy by Jade

A Realistic Topic With a Hint of Fantasy by Jade - June 2014 Scholarship Essay

Books are great. People have been reading them for hundreds of years. Many aspire to be writers or some simply just write for their own pleasure. For both the writer and the reader, it’s a way for them to escape into an alternate universe full of fiction where they can dive into being someone else, feel the things the characters do and watch the growth of that character. Some books even teach some type of moral in it or leave enough of a gap that it can be discussed and elaborated by friends or even in classes.

I want to write about a character dealing with real life problems such as stress, depression and anxieties. They won't be perfect and flawless or be a special snowflake like how certain books makes their characters. They'll be realistic like any everyday person. They’ll have friends that try their best to help but don’t know what to do; they’ll have parents that try to deny their child being the way they are and so on. Everything would be realistic so when readers that go through similar situations like this can relate and say “I found something that put how I felt into words”.

The fiction has to come in somewhere, right? Despite how realistic the main character feels, they will try to escape reality as much as they can. They’ll create something like a fantasy land to help them escape and feel better about themselves. The world would be colorful, a world without much worries. They’ll be what they think is a “better” version of themselves; happy, confident, strong, normal…Of course, their world would be flawed as well since no one can escape reality fully. Since the world is based off of their imagination, their subconscious will come in and create the “villains”. They would represent the different aspects of depression such as reliving the worst in them, the constant whispering of doubt they have, shape shifters that would turn into their worst fears or even friends and so on. They would have to battle them one by one. The events that happen in their made up world would be a reflection of what they go through in real life. Eventually, their friend will catch hints of what’s really going on and try their hardest to help them. This contributes to the main characters fantasy self to gain more strength to conquer the villains. That’s the type of story I would write.

The reason why I want to write something like this is because of my own personal experience. It can give me something to elaborate on and portray what I or my close friend goes through. It would help many teenagers out there going through depression something to relate to and appreciate. It would be realistic. It would hopefully teach people not dealing with depression that it’s not something to romanticize about or even disregard as something like “attention-seeking”. It would teach people that this is a real world issue. It would also teach a person with depression that they shouldn't feel lonely, abnormal or hopeless. That’s the kind of vision I want to give out if I were to ever write this book.