Journal Entry #1

What do you know?

When I go home and write, I usually never reflect on my personal life through journals like many others may do. I write about things that I fantasize; adventure, love, drama, action, suspense, thrills, and many other feelings and emotions.
The most common thing I write about, is about the fantastical world. The world some of us imagine being filled with elves, dwarves, dragons and legendary warriors fighting a dark lord for an ancient crystal to save the world. When I write about these things, I tend to try and merge away from other classic topics and cliches. Hero saves princess, hero kills bad guy, hero is down in life and must find himself, hero must find secret artifact. Though these are broad ideas, I try to stay away from cliches as much as I can, because I hate when I'm reading a story, and I think to myself, I've seen that before, or, That's getting old. Sometimes taking ideas from authors and their stories are good, and expand your thinking, but stealing their ideas is a different story.
I know a lot about fantasy worlds, and how they are created, and even how they work in a story. Researching foreign ideas sounds wonderful to me, and the greatest topic I would research is ancient artifacts. Topics like mythology, religion, controversy really interest me. My character Jake Delaware I created, is my reflection of how much I love that stuff. I would love to research it and find out more so my characters and stories become more complex and interesting.
The characters and ideas I am not confident about writing, is usually love stories, horror stories and very used characters. What I mean about used characters, is the type of character that is in every story, and every movie. Usually, that means teenage heroes. I don't know why, but I am sick of, and can't stand teenage heroes. Some stories make it seem so unlikely that a teenager could be a hero, and only in certain ideas it would work. I don't have anything against love stories or horror stories, in fact I love horror stories, but love and horror stories, I tend to have a hard time establishing an original story. That is soemthing I plan to work on this semester.