For the past few years, senior Mikayla Bush has been writing a book.
Mikayla never really had the intention to publish any books. However, since her summer camp the summer before sophomore year, she has been working hard on her fantasy book that she hopes to soon publish for everyone to read.
“The original idea for the book came up when I was attending a summer camp at Camp Roger,” Mikayla said. “We were on a three-night hiking trip, and along the way, to entertain ourselves, there was a group of four or five of us who were just coming up with this random story. I want to say this was the summer before my sophomore year, and once that summer camp trip ended, I had written the main plot down on four pieces of scrap paper. I turned it into a layout plan of what it was going to be.”
At first, she didn’t necessarily desire to write a book and publish it. She really just wanted to create something for herself to remember those memories and ideas that she came up with in her mind, and one way she could do that was to write them down.
Although she had a pretty big idea of what she wanted the book to look like in her mind, she didn’t realize how hard it was going to be to finish the book.
“The original goal was to get it published by the end of the year,” Mikayla said. “A lot of things came up, and I am currently stuck trying to finish the last chapter, which I’ve rewritten like six or seven times. If you ask me, the hardest part of writing a book is not the first sentence, not the first chapter, it’s the last chapter because I can’t get it to be satisfying to me.”
Another thing she thinks is interesting about writing a book is that she found herself through her character, and she grew up along with her character. After a few years of writing the book, she’s been starting to see the flaws in her main character, especially that she didn’t realize they had before because she had flaws of her own which goes right along with the theme of her book.
“Morally wise, the main theme is about finding yourself,” Mikayla said. “It’s kind of like my own spin of Narnia. It’s about a bunch of these kids who come from summer camp, and they get taken to this world, and they’re trying to find their way back home. During this process, at some point, every single character has a hard time finding themselves and what they’re supposed to be doing. It very much stems from a sense of hopelessness because during the time that we were coming up with the story, I was still struggling with mental health, and I really wanted to find a way to connect that and have characters that were feeling lost but not necessarily are truly lost.”
The reason she came up with a fantasy book is because those were the kinds of books she used to read all the time. She loves reading Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, and when she was younger, she loved reading the Wings of Fire book series. She adored reading those types of fantasy books so she wanted to create something like that on her own.
Another thing that she loves about writing her own book series is that she can incorporate some of her other favorite things within the book.
“I believe I have these different sketches of maps that I created,” Mikayla said. “One of my other favorite things is doing art, so I’ve created maps for it. I have notebooks upon notebooks just about the world itself because another one of my favorite things to do is world-building, which, at first, made it kind of hard to get through. After all, I love creating the world but I’m not truly good at writing about the world.”
One thing that has inspired Mikayla to write fantasies is camping. She enjoys camping with her family, and she loves nature. She loves the waterfalls, running through rivers, and riding bikes around in parks. She’s grown up camping, which is what inspired her to write her book about summer camp.
Although she’s nearly done, she’s really hoping to continue writing stories to publish.
“Writing the last chapter, I want to leave myself enough room to be able to write a second book,” Mikayla said. “That’s difficult because if it doesn’t get popular, I want it to be able to be a stand-alone book. But I want it just enough to be like if I want to write a sequel, I want it to be understandable, and also, if people read it, they can try to imagine what goes on after the book.”
