When I was in the third grade, we were assigned a project that had several different options. I don’t remember what the exact project was–or what any of the other options were–all I remember is that there was a creative writing option, and I wrote a story about the Loch Ness Monster. (It’s possible the whole project centered around the Loch Ness Monster, but I can’t say for certain.)
I remember being so excited to be creative and to write my own story. Since that day, any time I was given a creative writing option, I took it. Even if I never knew where the story was headed, give me a prompt, and let’s see where it takes us, shall we?
Throughout grade school, junior high, and high school, my friends and I would write stories–sometimes together–and swap pages. At one point, one of my childhood best friends and I were each working on stories based on dreams we’d had. When she moved, I had her make a copy of her story just so I’d always have it. (I still do.)
I also hoard my writing like a paper dragon. I have notebooks upon notebooks of story beginnings, poems, and random lines I thought sounded cool. I also kept a lot of papers I turned in to teachers and professors with their red-inked feedback.
The downside of that is storage space, but the positive is that I still have the very first version of what would become Veritas. (And all of the subsequent versions, including the first, very rough, complete draft.) Sometimes I go back and read portions of these versions to remind myself how far the story has come, and how far I’ve come as a writer.
The concept for Veritas originally came to me while I was mowing the summer before my freshman year of high school.
My parents own rental property in my hometown, and they have a set of three apartments. To make a little extra money in the summers, I would mow the grass at the apartments. I’d put headphones in and listen to music on my MP3 player. As I’d mow and let the music play, I’d tell myself stories. Sometimes I was the main character and sometimes just the narrator.
My original idea started with a girl and the boy next door, who were best friends. Then he dies, and his parents move away, but a mysterious stranger and his family move into her friend’s old house.
I wrote out the beginning scenes, and these characters started taking shape, and as the years continued on, I felt myself drawn to this world and these people I had created. I kept coming back to the story and revising the beginning a little–and then adding another chapter.
Then in college, I needed a major creative project for one of my senior seminars (I’m an overachiever and I double majored, so I had two senior seminars), and I wanted to keep working on it. Luckily, it didn’t have to be done, just a pretty healthy start.
There was another student in that class who always wrote more than the required page count, and we were in competition to see who could write more for our senior projects. I won because when I gave him updates, I told him my page count before I double spaced it. Some may call that cheating, but I call it strategy. I’m a delight at game nights.
After college, whenever I was doing mindless tasks, my thoughts always went back to the story. I was working at the grocery store at the time, and I kept a notebook or scraps of paper on me at all times to jot down ideas.
Then I moved to Kansas City, and while I was looking for a job, I spent my days finishing what would become the very first draft of Veritas. By that point, I was so invested in the story that I wanted to see where it would go. That was in the fall of 2015.
It’s been almost 10 years since I finished writing that first draft.
At the AWP conference, one panelist said that sometimes the first book you write isn’t the first book you publish. Sometimes you get lucky, and it is. Veritas might not ever get published, and if that’s the case, I won’t lie; it’ll be a little devastating.
But I have a good feeling about it.
Britnie Jenkins 