I never would have imagined that a movie I watched over the summer of 2010 would forever alter my perspective on creative writing, songwriting, and music composition. Even though the film’s characters were high school students and I was entering seventh grade, the varied personalities in the movie could be like those of my close friends. As the months passed, the idea of putting my thoughts about a short story based on the film on paper barely entered my mind. That all changed on October 9, 2010, when my grandmother, brother, cousin, and I were all invited by a religious organization to travel to a state park in Allensworth, California. To keep from being bored, I brought a black college-ruled spiral loose-leaf notebook and pencils.
The trip on charter bus from Oakland to Allensworth would take about six hours, so I began penning a short story based on the film “10 Things I Hate About You” titled “My First Love”. Like the movie, the story centered on two sisters whose father told them that they would be allowed to date only if they simultaneously had boyfriends. But while many
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After all, a lot of musicians like myself are songwriters, making them essentially storytellers as they write about almost anything and everything. And at the time, I had the fantasy of turning my work into a film. But I faced three obstacles: I did not know anyone who was willing to sing that song; even if I did find a singer, I did not have adequate background music I could use to popularize the song (even though I had produced twelve instrumentals on the music-production program GarageBand at a summer program); and to me, the lyrics seemed incredibly out of place. So, a few days after the trip, when I typed my short story at home, I changed the storyline so that the boyfriend would instead sing a rendition of “I Don’t Want to Wait” by Paula